Japanese – What’s the big deal?? (Part One)

It'll Be Grand!

Post 3:

Japanese is generally regarded as a very challenging language to learn from the perspective of native English speakers for several reasons. The one you are likely to hear most often is that you have to learn “three alphabets!!”, and certainly this must be quite off-putting to people thinking about trying to pick up a language. But it is interesting to consider that English already has two alphabets – which I think many native speakers never quite realise.

a, b, c, d, e, f, …

A, B, C, D, E, F, …

We tend to think we only have one alphabet, but if you look objectively at it, “a” looks nothing like “A”, “b” looks nothing like “B” and so on. Around half of the letters are different enough between upper and lower cases as to be considered completely different. If you had to learn English (including the alphabet) from scratch, then upper and lower cases would look like two completely different sets of letters. The two Japanese phonetic alphabets – called hiragana and katakana - are very similar in this way. For example, the sound “ka” is か in hiragana, and カ in katakana, which are very similar and can be learned together.

So, when you hear “three alphabets!!” remember that English already has two, and don’t get too scared.

As for the third “alphabet” – the Chinese characters known as kanji – well, few things in life that are truly worth doing are easy after all...But the difficulty that comes with the kanji mainly comes down to an exercise in memorisation.

When we consider the reasons why Japanese is regarded as difficult for English speakers, it can’t simply be because of the writing system since, as we have already mentioned, these ultimately come down to memory exercises which are present in every language (no matter what you always need to memorise a huge amount of vocabulary after all). So, there must be something deeper, something which separates Japanese from other languages and makes it uniquely tricky for native English speakers – and indeed there are several.

I will go into more detail on some of these difficulties next time, but just to give a flavour, here are a few of the tricky things that come up:

• Sentences without any subject

• Verbs which don’t have an object (where they usually should)

• Japanese doesn’t have a future tense

In short, English natives learning Japanese often end up scratching their heads in bewilderment, sounding like Jasper from The Simpsons - “you shot who in the what now?”

(Continued in Part Two)

by GG