Sometimes Japanese is Easy to Learn

With a sentence structure and grammar unlike anything used in the West along with three different writing systems, learning the Japanese language can certainly be challenging. Then again, there are times when Japanese learners get off easy. First, there are whole swaths of words that are simple to learn, thanks to the way kanji words can be appended to the ends of other words. If you need to specify a language, just add the kanji for language (go) the end of a country name, resulting in France-go, Russia-go and so on. Similarly, nationality can be specified by sticking the character for “person” (jin, pronounced “jean”) on the end of a country name, for example America-jin, Nihon-jin, etc. When the Japanese adopted the Western calendar during the Meiji Era, they wisely named January ichi-gatsu (1-month), February ni-gatsu (2-month) and so on, so gaijin don’t need to learn complex names of months in Japanese. One of the most difficult areas of English for Japanese to learn are verb tenses like conditional, past perfect and present progressive, but I’m happy to report that none of these forboding structures exist in Japanese — incredibly complex sentences like “next year he will have been to Kyoto five times” get reduced to simpler forms. There’s more good news: Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Vietnamese, making it much easier for English speakers to pronounce. There are some difficult patches in the language, of course, including concepts like “sister” which get split into two, oneesan (older sister) and imouto (younger sister), or samui (coldness in the air) vs tsumetai (coldness to the touch), but all in all not everything about learning Japanese is difficult.

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