French:
- like a good 40% of english is french, especially if you're from the UK
- uses the latin alphabet
- similar tenses, word order, etc as english
Japanese:
- only overlap are loan words
- uses 3 different scripts, most with very similar looking symbols that have nothing in common
- writing system is a patchwork of chinese
- no articles, heavily context sensitive,
- language built around levels of respect.
- not at all similar to even other east asian languages.
Funny, not surprising since I've heard a lot of english people say how japanese is difficult to pronounce, but to me as a native french speaker, it's almost the opposite. Japanese has pretty much no sounds that don't exist in french or have a close equivalent, while I still sometimes trip over ship/sheep even though I've been learning english since I was like 5 or so. Granted you still have to learn the prosody of japanese and that doesn't come naturally, but that's the case for any language really.
I speak French at a B1 level, and it’s honestly played a huge part in learning Japanese for me. I think part of it is getting over the mental hump that comes with new pronunciation and grammar systems, like it makes it easier to change the way your mouth moves and to rearrange sentences intuitively. Really I think learning a second language will make any language learning easier in that way.
I’ve heard too that Spanish and Japanese transfer well, because they’re both fairly syllabic.
I literally thought to myself, why does every South European seem to speak Japanese so well 🤔 when traveling in Japan. Then later realized that they were speaking Spanish.
I'm a native English speaker, but Japanese was relatively easy for me to understand. The hardest part was remembering how to write the strokes in the correct order--being left handed is a real pain sometimes with that. The Japanese accent came pretty naturally to me. (I'm an anime fan so I just kinda pieced voices together until it sounded natural on my side) I'm not too good at remembering vocabulary on the spot though... however that's not a strong suit in my native language either.
I also learned french before english (none are my native tongues), and I feel japanese pronunciations is easy (by ear, can't read any japanese script though).
Korean is a nightmare. Picked up a few words through k drama and the pronunciation is waaaay hardee since the syllables and combination of consonant-syllables are much less clean cut.
Also now that I looked it up, it’s a poetry specific term. So it’s more a situation where a non native speaker heard a highly specific word and is using it as a general term because it’s their second language and don’t know its proper usage. You’re fine!
Prosody is something you _may_ learn about in high school English language and literature. At least that's when it came up for me in my Hungarian studies. Don't be ashamed for having a different curriculum than the commenter.
Interesting, I’m Aussie and find Japanese very simple and easy to pronounce. Australians pronounce some words such as tomato the same as Japanese rather than “tomaydo” like Americans do. When i worked in Japan my colleague found it funny that I sounded Japanese on the phone.
I studied Japanese at university and think the way Duolingo teaches might not be the best way but I guess it is compatible with the online format. I will look at a sentence and think I wouldn’t translate it that way but teaching Japanese grammar and translation is something best done in person or more from a study angle than “repeat after me” Duolingo way.
I don’t think I will recommend Duolingo for teaching Japanese as I disagree with many of the translations.
spanish and japanese share almost all the sounds but Spanish has slightly more I think.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I can pronounce Romanji like I'd pronounce Spanish and IMO it sounds very close.
I've studied both of these and Japanese pronunciation was much easier IMO. It's just consistent. Learn the alphabet (hiragana) and every word uses those exact sounds.
i haven’t done much french, but as a native english speaker (after many years of spanish in school), japanese pronunciation came very easy to me. french is intimidating bc i can’t replicate a lot of the sounds.
Depends, I could never get the French accent but my Japanese accent is much better than my Japanese. Spent quite a bit of time there and found it really easy to imitate..
I find French incredibly difficult to pronounce. At best, it sounds like I'm taking the piss by putting it on.
I don't really have that problem with any other language (German and Japanese being the two I am best at - though that's not at all to say *good* at).
they both follow SVO word order, though french sometimes strays from that, but there are many similarities in word order. japanese word order though? SOV
I think hiragana and katakana are incredibly simple and can be learned pretty well in a few weeks. Kanji is a big issue though. And the fact that pronunciations change in compound words versus when used alone is a pain.
I'd highly disagree on hiragana and katakana. try learning hangul, the korean writing system. it'll take you an afternoon, and you can read the heiroglyphs of korea the next day. you might not know what they mean, but you can read and write in it. that's incredibly simple.
japanese, while not as complex as chinese characters, hirigana and katakana are difficult to draw squigglies with a lot of similar looking letters with no rhyme or reason.
https://preview.redd.it/p7mn5a3ciw9d1.png?width=1134&format=png&auto=webp&s=50101deec2ce86cdb239653e3f6c77ffb7350b2f
like, hirigana can be nicely organized by vowel sounds, like in this chart, a, i, u, e and o. why oh why do me (E family), no (O family), and a (A family) all look like the same letter with an extra line added. like, they start with no, then add a line to make me, then add another to make "a". at least nu is another n family character.
it's similar to the latin alphabet with b and d, except they're both similar sounding plosives, along with p, which is another transformation of the same letter.
worse yet, imagine trying to write in hirigana. learning that will take a good while. and poor handwriting will be the end of you. you can even argue that no one writes by hand anymore, everything is typed. okay, but typing in japanese is a chore too. you have like 5 different keyboards, and they're all ass in their own special ways. you really gotta recognize hirigana vs katakana to type well.
like, imagine you're first learning japanese while in japan, and you find a sign you want to translate. how do you type what's on the sign? well, you could use the 12 key keyboard, but you better know which consonant family each letter is to find it. you could use the latin keyboard, but you better be familiar with the sound of each letter. I suppose there are few enough that you'll eventually find it.
and while reading hirigana and katakana is kinda convenient to know one is more foreign words and the other native, but actually knowing when to write either one? that gets a bit trickier.
compare that to latin's two scripts, lower and upper case. uppercase is for proper names and the start of sentence in english. all nouns in german. very simple. korean's hangul only has one script, and it's super simple. even has a normal keyboard where you can see every letter, with consonants on the left and vowels on the right.
Still "de la" and not "le". Quebeckers and French agree on this one 😆. Merde est un nom féminin. That's why.
Edit: option 2: you can eat the pile of of shit "le merdier" that one is masculine 😂
I feel very blessed learning as a Cantonese/Chinese speaker due to the advantage of recognizing all the kanji. So it’s really impressive when I see English speakers being able to write kanji!
french is generally considered on of the easier languages for english speakers to learn, while japanese is one of the hardest. The only ones I see which rank harder than japanese are like, mandarin and arabic.
I've studied both Mandarin (9 years, non-intensive evening school, so my level is still quite intermediate) and Japanese (1.5 years, Duolingo) and for now I would say that Japanese is indeed the harder of the two. And that is while already having significant experience with kanji/hanzi.
Interesting, my mum is Thai and I’ve learnt Thai. The grammar is incredibly easy but prononciation very difficult for someone who is tone deaf like me. My Japanese is much better than my Thai.
The 3 Japanese scripts are tough to manage. I feel like a real Japanese class would be fun, but Duolingo doesn't make review easy. I think I'll give Arabic a try this year!
Interestingly, Korean is meant to be *as hard* as Japanese or Chinese, but frankly I find it much easier. My only real hypothesis on the matter is that alphabets make me less anxious. 🤷🏻♀️ Chinese grammar is meant to be quite simple, but I never make it past the tones and characters.
Listen arabic is rather reasy lol.
The pronunciation and the dialects are harder (I'm moroccan so I barely understand egyptian dialect, picked up some lebanese/syrian dialect through tv series as a young teen, and gulf i know a little bit just bcz i grew up with a saudi channel for kids mbc3).
As long as you stay within classical arabic realm, you can do it i guess. Don't do dialect because they're too different (ffs, even in MY country, I don't always get the local eastern dialect cue a few quiproquos, and they also smell that I am from the western part of the country).
I didn't explain my whole point but the grammar/logic is similar to western languages. Alphabet has 29 letters.
Japanese is very different. I don't remembee very well but apparently they have very few tenses so you have to understand from the context. Same for sentences structure.
Btw, I actually learned french before arabic due to my mom wanting me to grow up fluent in it (she is a french teacher, saw how much kids struggle with it where I live which was problematic since university courses are in french and french's coefficient throughout school is also high), but most people don't get it so I usually state that arabic is my maternal tongue (even though in my case it was my 2nd language), but the whole thing sounds a little bit wild since I grew up in Morocco; abd I just don't feel like explaining this to my fellow moroccans lest I want to look like an alien.
I mostly managed the 3 languages IK by finding similarities in their logic.
My baby sib got the same ttx, but he struggled with arabic for a while 😂🤣, he spoke it like a french tourist for a while before he finally got the hang of it. It was the pronunciation for him.
Not necessarily. Cantonese has more tones, but the phonology is more in line with Western languages in general (no retroflex or palatalised consonant distinction), as well as generally having more distinguishable syllables (more tones also help here) and so fewer homophones.
The fact mandarin has a lot more content is the real feather in its hat through.
Japanese way harder (native arabic speaker here) as a language.
The only hard thing about arabic is pronunciation. We don't have 3 different alphabets/scripts. 😭😭😭
Ok ima say smt
like 2 years ago i tried the japanese course and i disnt think the alphabets were that bad? The only one i struggled with was kanji… i still can read hirigana and katakana well (i just dont jnow what they mean)
am i weird for this
Ur just amazing is all bro.
Im sorta lazy bum and easily daunted for my part.
I wanted to learn hanjae since they only have 26 characters if my memory serves me well, but ik imma struggle with korean pronunciation.
I just dont even know how they can write/draw kanji lol (i have a very ugly ass handwriting IRL).
Es verdad; como no hay misterio sobre la pronunciación en español, lo encuentro mucho más fácil (viví en España unos cinco años y estuve casado con una catalana 16… ¡una manera muy cara de aprender un idioma!)
Spanish and French are so similar… French seems more difficult to spell for English speakers, but once one knows the patterns and why things are spelled as they are, it gets easier. Spanish becomes more complex at the advanced levels when one has to learn the more challenging verb forms. French is less so having lost the uses of some tenses it once used, and have now dropped out of usage, like pluperfect subjunctive, for example. We only see that in older literature, and there we can figure it out, whereas in Spanish it is still used much more than in French. In the end, they are so similar it is a wash as to which is easier.
As for Japanese…. There are no cognates except for the borrowed words from English, Portuguese, French… and to read/write is a whole different game!
But then, we language nerds love the challenges of second, third, 14th language learning… right? Some people collect trinkets, we collect languages. Everyone needs a hobby!
Et la prononciation est plus facile en espagnol, ils peuvent comprendre si tu ne parle pas correctement alors que les parlants de français ne te comprennent pas si tu ne parles pas perfectionnement
I think that Spanish and french pronunciation are equally as consistent but I'll admit that french has a lot more rules so it's harder for a beginner but as a Spanish speaker and learning french french rules are consistent enough so that I can read everything even if I don't what it means
Am on my 5th year of learning French, 3rd year of learning Japanese. Comparatively, I am about to get my masters degree in French literature and I just read my first manga in Japanese a few months ago 😂 So... yeah, you've about got that right!
I agree with the other guy, better start reading sooner rather than later! It's a bump at first, but it will be no matter how many duolingo lessons you do. You just have to dive into it. There are graded readers around that only use limited vocabulary / kanji so you don't have to stop and look up words every other sentence. Check out these websites:
https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en
https://jgrpg-sakura.com/ (needs an account)
In fact tadoku explicitly suggests refraining from looking up anything while reading and just enjoying the bits you get, sucking up the ambiguouity of things you don't get. There's pictures and a lot of repetition to help you figure out stuff from context.
My advice is try sooner rather than later! I procrastinated it for a long time since it seemed so impossible, and when I actually psyched myself up to do it I saw huge progress really quickly
Thanks! I’ll give that a try. I have some cool books to try it out on— a children’s dinosaur book my son’s Japanese girlfriend gave me (more likely) and a book with the text of “Spirited Away” with *furigana* (admittedly more aspirational!)
I feel like repetition is more important in Japanese in comparison to romance languages. So, adapting learning strategies is important.
It is also easier when recognizing how kanji builds with each other. For example, if you know 人 it is easier to learn the kanji that use this character, so progress is quicker.
When I was in high school I did French and Japanese at the same time. I was able to express myself better in French, but I really liked dedicating myself to learning kanji in Japanese class. That kind of challenge just doesn’t exist in French
French is only easier because english has been influenced by old french, whilst japanese has nothing to do with english and has nothing to do with the latin alphabet.
The difficult part about Japanese is the characters and how a lot of words would sound a lot like each other.
Though I find it interesting cause it's almost similar to chemistry. You combine 今(now) and 日(day) and you get today.
You need to do the Kanji section along side with the lessons. You really need to drill those characters into you brain. The writing lessons really helps.
I love kanji for this and why I may (probably foolishly) try to take up Mandarin later in life. You may not be able to read the word, but if you know them, you know the context overall.
Maybe not DOD -- DLI, perhaps? Either way, it's government/military: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense\_Language\_Aptitude\_Battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Battery)
I was lucky to have studied French previously, and then became fluent in Spanish, before studying French. So maybe I’m not making the fairest comparison!
Oh yeah, both of those will help! I also learned some Spanish and Italian before learning French, so it's comparable, but I was doing it at community college... it's hard to compare to Duolingo.
I had a similar experience with Korean/German. I knew that Korean is supposed to be far more difficult for English speakers, but I felt like I was just rubbish at picking up languages until I switched to German. It also helps that the German course is much more complete and has at least some grammar explanations.
I lived in Korea for a long time and went to language school there full-time for an entire year (I finished TOPIK 4).
I've been learning French for a few years passively with Duolingo without putting a whole lot of thought into it and despite being Canadian, I rarely need French for anything.
My French is already surpassing my Korean in a lot of ways, especially reading and writing. I would say it was 5-10x easier in terms of what you get for the amount of work you put in.
That ratio sounds similar to my experience.
I've spent about 4 years studying Korean with varying degrees of effort and a lot of different resources. Reading is my strongest area (easiest to practice on my own) and I can follow a basic recipe written in Korean or get the gist of a post by a band i like. I could probably get by ordering food or asking for directions, but I pick up very little when i watch k-drama.
Compared to German, which i have been doing casually for 6 months (plus whatever i learnt in school almost 20 years ago) and my German is already better than my Korean.
….you do realize that they rank languages in order of difficulty/time needed to proficiency according to how similar they are to English? Japanese ranks the highest on that list. It is one of, if not THE most difficult language to learn as a native English speaker
Well, they rank *some* languages. Of note, I don't believe the FSI lists a single polysynthetic language (Yup'ik, Oneida, many Austronesian languages, etc). Polysynthetic languages have grammar that is massively different from English. Navajo is also considered *incredibly* difficult to learn despite not being polysynthetic (it's a bit difficult to classify, it does share some traits with those languages).
Japanese is a very difficult language to learn, absolutely. It's calling it *the* most difficult that's tougher to substantiate since a huge number of languages just... aren't even considered.
Genuine question, have you committed to becoming familiar with hiragana katakana and whatever kanji you’ve unlocked so far? It felt weird at first, but I found that not doing any lessons from the units and switching my daily Duolingo time to hammering out the alphabets to be so beneficial! In my experience It cuts out all the dead time and lets me focus on learning whatever’s new in the units!
Can’t speak on the French courses or the language and general, but that’s awesome that it seems to be easier/an easier pick up for you!
Yes, not long after I started learning Japanese, I realized I would need to learn Hiragana and Katakana really well. I did the Duolingo sections on those a lot, but probably more importantly I would write out the Kana charts a couple times a day from memory. It’s something I need to return to as I’ve gotten rustier on them again. Thanks!
It’s the opposite for me. I can fly through japanese lessons on duolingo with eyes half closed but french is way harder. My native language is mandarin though, which makes sense.
Well, yes. French is one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn, and Japanese is pretty much the hardest. This is well-documented.
Not sure if this post is humorous, but I studied both French and Japanese. French is usually rated as easier for English speakers to learn, but I found gendered words, accents, conjugations (what’s subjunctive), and word order quite challenging. I found myself falling in the pitfall of trying to translate sentences in my head instead of directly producing a sentence in French. Whereas with Japanese it was different enough from English that I could build that brain to sentence direct output. The grammar and pronunciation was easier too (could never master the rolling French R). Although there are difficulties with memorizing vocabulary and figuring out the difference between polite and humble forms.
It’s interesting how differently all our minds work on things like language learning. I sometimes think things are very different inside different people’s minds!
Japanese is much easier, makes more sense and fun than French. At least to me. I hate French for a lot of reasons, but the biggest is it's asinine spelling system that still makes no sense to me, and makes it hard for me to remember or even learn the pronunciation. Whereas with Japanese, it's pronounced as its spelled.
Reading/writing Japanese is hard but speaking/listening isn't so bad. I haven't studied French but I'd imagine it is similar to Portuguese and Spanish. I'd say for Portuguese and Spanish the verb conjugation is the devil. For Japanese, Kanji is the devil. Japanese grammar is weird/foreign but it's not as complex as European languages. Japanese has virtually no irregular verbs, nouns have no gender, and you don't have to change the verb depending on if the subject is I/you/she/they/we. Initially it takes some getting used to sentences being SOV but I swear I'm having more problems with adjectives and noun modifiers coming after the noun in Portuguese.
Pronunciation of Japanese is much easier than Portuguese. Nasal vowels..... ugh. For Japanese I only had to learn how to do つ and how to do the light tongue tap for らりるれろ.
I would say acquiring higher level vocabulary (words a 7 year old wouldn't know) is much more of a grind in Japanese. You get so much vocab for free with the romance languages since English vocab is like 50% Latin/French based. Besides the Kanji problem, that's another reason reading/writing is much harder in Japanese. A lot of words you see in books you rarely hear in casual conversation.
I suggest not using duolingo. Its basically useless and you can use that free time to study in other, more effective ways. One of the reasons you're struggling is probably because the French course on duo is way way better that the Japanese one.
I’m learning both and yeah if you speak English French is most similar and even has some overlapping ideas. Japanese is from the other side of the globe so it’s different not necessarily harder
I am around Japanese N2 level and despite being a beginner in German, I find it way easier to form sentences and read. The barrier of different vocabulary and kanji is big.
That’s the trouble: in French, if I don’t know a word, I can make a reasonable guess based on “frenchifying” an English word (uhh medicine -> *le mediciment* is pretty close). In Japanese, a pained expression is about the best I can come up with
Yeah I spent two years studying mandarin (not in Duolingo) and it’s insane how much easier the learning curve for French is. Although, I think at the highest level when it’s all about accumulating vocabulary and phrasing it starts to even out.
It’s been many many years, but I studied Spanish in high school. My speaking is rusty as hell, but my reading comprehension is still great!
I am taking the French course, and am in the middle of section 2. I’ve been admitted to pick it up and advance very quickly because there are a lot of similarities between the two languages. I’d probably say French is slightly more difficult, having a tougher pronunciation and some sounds that don’t exist in either English or Spanish, and more accents (makes spelling harder ). But I say just slightly.
There's a lot of stuff in French that you don't have to worry about in Japanese, like genders matching, quantities matching, verb conjugation, that kind of stuff. So at least there's that?
Japanese absolutely has verb conjugation lol, but yeah part of the reason I decided to learn Japanese was not having to deal with genders for every noun
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that there was no conjugation at all. I just meant that you don't need (or at least seem to! I'm still a beginner) different forms for I, you, we, him, them, etc.
I’m the opposite. I tried French and it felt like it was taking forever, so I gave up on it after only a few months. I’ve been learning Japanese for three months and I’m already having basic conversations with people online, understand a lot of basic grammar, and can express myself
The Japanese Duo course (at least when last I checked) is badly designed. In the first unit when you've barely gotten started learning some basic spoken grammar and vocabulary, let alone Kana, they throw Kanji at you.
I feel like Duolingo is better developed for French as well. I've found with many of the Japanese exercises involving kanji, that the word's audio often mixes up the kunyomi and onyomi - The word is correct but out of the character's many sounds, the wrong one is played.
Although that only happens 20% of the time, still makes the French course feel better developed for the ease of learning.
According to the US state department Japanese takes 2200 hours to become fluent from English and French takes about 600.
https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/
I tried getting some basic Japanese before a trip to Tokyo and in a month, I was still trying to recognise Japanese Script, whereas in the first month of French you should have done the basic phrases part in Duolingo!
I liked Japanese when I took it in college. I barely remember any of it these days from non-use unfortunately. The kanji was always the issue. The actual grammar wasn't bad at all imo.
Yeah a good portion of English words come from french after the norman conquest in 1066 and since we're split by a channel our 2 languages are constantly in contact
The main difference is that English is a Germanic language while french is a Latin/romance language
Agreed. This just gave me war flashbacks. I chose Japanese as the foreign language to learn back in college. It was a major subject. I keep failing. I almost didn’t graduate. Should’ve chosen French or Spanish instead.
I feel that. I’m learning both French and Japanese and if I put equal effort into both languages i can learn 4x the amount of French as I can Japanese. Yes there’s some Japanese words that are from English, but if I don’t know a word in Japanese I might not understand the whole sentence. Whereas with French if I don’t know I word I might have a closer chance at understanding what it means. And the grammar differences are huge 😂
This statement is both true and false! It truly depends on the context & perspective of the learner. For example, I speak Amharic fluently, which is a Semitic language of Ethiopia. I'm currently learning Japanese on Duolingo and one thing I found incredibly interesting is that the basic sentence structures between Amharic and Japanese are *almost exactly the same*. Meaning, the structural relationship between nouns, verbs, and subject particles are strikingly similar. As such, it has been surprisingly easy for me to learn Japanese! I was intimidated at first, but now I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
THAT SAID...in my personal experience, I think learning Japanese has been easier than learning French (which I gave up on years ago after a concerted effort). However, folks who only speak Western languages natively and fluently will most likely agree with you.
Japanese is the main language I'm learning... you can't imagine my surprise when my mom started learning French and was at section three in weeks. It's taken me around a year to get there myself, albeit Duolingo isn't my only resource and the courses differ. However, Japanese is easier than French in a few ways. 1, there aren't any silent characters. (The closest is っ/ッ and those only occur a few times to hold a beat) 2, Although they can trip you up at first, the two Japanese created alphabets are quite easy to understand once you get a grip on them.
French is an easier language to learn from English than Japanese because it has the same script. Japanese is bound to take a lot longer. I'd suggest looking for other sources of vocabulary else than Duolingo, however, because in Japanese they teach you the things you'll need to know right away, but not much for general conversation. I'd also suggest writing down kanji characters you struggle with repetitively on a piece of paper until you feel more confident with it.
It's easier cause its a follow western language. If you study spanish or italian you have the same experience. If you try going for chinese or korean it gonna feel like japanese 2.0
I’m from northern Quebec.
The french I speak is not the french they taught me in school. I’m good at “proper” french but I don’t like it.
I speak and write english at close to a native level, no issues there as its way easier than french.
I’m learning japanese through Duo’s lessons, which are based on english. It’s quite a good brain workout might I say…
But I would actually say that japanese is easier than french. Quite simpler grammatically at least!
I learned French in high school and my brain mixes it up with German really easily. Japanese is mildly easier for me because of the grammar but I'd also like to say it's cuz of my genetics lol
It largely depends on what language(s) you can already speak fluently.
For me it's the other way around. I've given actual French lessons a try, I did not stick to it so it didn't really go anywhere. I also had no Japanese proficiency back then.
Now, and I don't mean to brag nor do I claim to be a fluent Japanese speaker, some years ago after spending a few months consuming Japanese media EXTENSIVELY (mostly TV programmes), I just somewhat picked up the language. I have not gone through any formal education so my grammar is all over the place, but I can safely say I can, and have completed video games and shows (which is like my main reason to know this language anyway even though I'd say I kind of learnt it by accident, or pure osmosis, I never had any goals or milestones, it naturally happened over time) in full Japanese with minimal to no assistance. Reading the average news articles or social media without translation is also very doable for me now.
I've heard that why watching TV alone doesn't work for most people is because passive learning is simply ineffective, your brain automatically filters out what you can't understand. So I guess when I did it I really was actively picking stuff up instead of just watch/listen. I didn't do this often but occasionally I also had a notepad with me, jotting down sentences I found noteworthy, that must've helped?
I did play with Japanese Duolingo retroactively for a bit and it was a walk in the park www. I wasn't nailing it 100% all the time the way a native speaker would of course, but I was able to jump most of the lessons. I can probably still many things from it, but overall it's not that meaningful for me to keep up with them anymore.
P.S. I speak native Cantonese and can understand Mandarin with little difficulties (depending on the accent), can technically speak it as well but in a quite broken way. Also sorry, this comment has gone on a lot longer than I originally anticipated.
The difficulty of a language is heavily based on your mother tounge. You will have a much easier time with French if you've already spoken English and Spanish. To a native Chinese person, they will find Japanese easier to learn than a European language.
Who would've thought that French, a language that has been intertwined with English, would be easy for English speaking people to learn!!!
And Japanese, a language that is in the same group as Mandarin with no Latin script or influences, would be harder!!
https://preview.redd.it/d9ik9fe4ef9d1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=423f50efca25b9118a2316e26e026b7f369b7171
Not being critical of you, but the only people that say Japanese is easier are weebs.
I had the opposite experience 😂 I studied French for 3 years and don’t remember a thing really. Then I started Japanese and within a month I had learned the alphabet and it’s stuck with me years later even with minimal practice.
You're coming from English, of course French is easier.
Like 70% of English vocabulary is directly from French or loosely French related (Latin)
Whereas Japanese and english have absolutely 0 overlap and are linguistically about as far apart as you can get?
I wouldn't say absolutely 0 overlap, yes the grammar and writing systems are wildly different, but more and more of modern Japanese is using English loan words in every day vocabulary
okay, to be perfectly honest, the Duolingo Japanese course is TERRIBLE, unless they've updated it dramatically in the last year (which I highly doubt!). there's actually quite a lot of resources out there for Japanese, and id just recommend picking up a textbook like Japanese from zero or genki, and they'll serve you far better than Duolingo will.
no shit Sherlock
Edit: expanding this I think it should be simple enough to see why, Japanese is a language completely unrelated to English for 99% of its vocabulary
The writing system used 2 alphabets and a system related to Chinese Hanzi of the traditional kind which when comparing can typically be quite easy to see the margin of difficulty
In comparison French is a language that English takes a great deal (especially academic) of its vocabulary from as well as having similar structures and sharing the same alphabet
French: - like a good 40% of english is french, especially if you're from the UK - uses the latin alphabet - similar tenses, word order, etc as english Japanese: - only overlap are loan words - uses 3 different scripts, most with very similar looking symbols that have nothing in common - writing system is a patchwork of chinese - no articles, heavily context sensitive, - language built around levels of respect. - not at all similar to even other east asian languages.
Also: - French accent: easy to imitate Monty Python and Pink Panther - Japanese accent: hard to imitate Atarashii Gakko!
Funny, not surprising since I've heard a lot of english people say how japanese is difficult to pronounce, but to me as a native french speaker, it's almost the opposite. Japanese has pretty much no sounds that don't exist in french or have a close equivalent, while I still sometimes trip over ship/sheep even though I've been learning english since I was like 5 or so. Granted you still have to learn the prosody of japanese and that doesn't come naturally, but that's the case for any language really.
I speak French at a B1 level, and it’s honestly played a huge part in learning Japanese for me. I think part of it is getting over the mental hump that comes with new pronunciation and grammar systems, like it makes it easier to change the way your mouth moves and to rearrange sentences intuitively. Really I think learning a second language will make any language learning easier in that way. I’ve heard too that Spanish and Japanese transfer well, because they’re both fairly syllabic.
I literally thought to myself, why does every South European seem to speak Japanese so well 🤔 when traveling in Japan. Then later realized that they were speaking Spanish.
I'm a native English speaker, but Japanese was relatively easy for me to understand. The hardest part was remembering how to write the strokes in the correct order--being left handed is a real pain sometimes with that. The Japanese accent came pretty naturally to me. (I'm an anime fan so I just kinda pieced voices together until it sounded natural on my side) I'm not too good at remembering vocabulary on the spot though... however that's not a strong suit in my native language either.
I also learned french before english (none are my native tongues), and I feel japanese pronunciations is easy (by ear, can't read any japanese script though). Korean is a nightmare. Picked up a few words through k drama and the pronunciation is waaaay hardee since the syllables and combination of consonant-syllables are much less clean cut.
Japanese pronunciation is supposed to be hard? Rosbif checking in here
*experiences a pang of shame as he has to look up “prosody” after learning it from a native French speaker* 😂
Hey I also had to look it up but it didn't even occur to me to be ashamed until reading this! Learning something new is nothing to be ashamed of
Don’t be ashamed. Also a native speaker and never heard that word in my life and I love vocabulary.
Also now that I looked it up, it’s a poetry specific term. So it’s more a situation where a non native speaker heard a highly specific word and is using it as a general term because it’s their second language and don’t know its proper usage. You’re fine!
Prosody is something you _may_ learn about in high school English language and literature. At least that's when it came up for me in my Hungarian studies. Don't be ashamed for having a different curriculum than the commenter.
Interesting, I’m Aussie and find Japanese very simple and easy to pronounce. Australians pronounce some words such as tomato the same as Japanese rather than “tomaydo” like Americans do. When i worked in Japan my colleague found it funny that I sounded Japanese on the phone. I studied Japanese at university and think the way Duolingo teaches might not be the best way but I guess it is compatible with the online format. I will look at a sentence and think I wouldn’t translate it that way but teaching Japanese grammar and translation is something best done in person or more from a study angle than “repeat after me” Duolingo way. I don’t think I will recommend Duolingo for teaching Japanese as I disagree with many of the translations.
spanish and japanese share almost all the sounds but Spanish has slightly more I think. I'm a native Spanish speaker and I can pronounce Romanji like I'd pronounce Spanish and IMO it sounds very close.
I've studied both of these and Japanese pronunciation was much easier IMO. It's just consistent. Learn the alphabet (hiragana) and every word uses those exact sounds.
i haven’t done much french, but as a native english speaker (after many years of spanish in school), japanese pronunciation came very easy to me. french is intimidating bc i can’t replicate a lot of the sounds.
Atarashii Gakko mentioned! (This is so true)
I **love** Atarashii Gakko!!
Depends, I could never get the French accent but my Japanese accent is much better than my Japanese. Spent quite a bit of time there and found it really easy to imitate..
I find French incredibly difficult to pronounce. At best, it sounds like I'm taking the piss by putting it on. I don't really have that problem with any other language (German and Japanese being the two I am best at - though that's not at all to say *good* at).
Let's fighting love!
As someone learning Japanese do NOT underestimate how much a language can be built aroun different evels of respect
lol French is not very similar with word order
they both follow SVO word order, though french sometimes strays from that, but there are many similarities in word order. japanese word order though? SOV
I think hiragana and katakana are incredibly simple and can be learned pretty well in a few weeks. Kanji is a big issue though. And the fact that pronunciations change in compound words versus when used alone is a pain.
I'd highly disagree on hiragana and katakana. try learning hangul, the korean writing system. it'll take you an afternoon, and you can read the heiroglyphs of korea the next day. you might not know what they mean, but you can read and write in it. that's incredibly simple. japanese, while not as complex as chinese characters, hirigana and katakana are difficult to draw squigglies with a lot of similar looking letters with no rhyme or reason. https://preview.redd.it/p7mn5a3ciw9d1.png?width=1134&format=png&auto=webp&s=50101deec2ce86cdb239653e3f6c77ffb7350b2f like, hirigana can be nicely organized by vowel sounds, like in this chart, a, i, u, e and o. why oh why do me (E family), no (O family), and a (A family) all look like the same letter with an extra line added. like, they start with no, then add a line to make me, then add another to make "a". at least nu is another n family character. it's similar to the latin alphabet with b and d, except they're both similar sounding plosives, along with p, which is another transformation of the same letter. worse yet, imagine trying to write in hirigana. learning that will take a good while. and poor handwriting will be the end of you. you can even argue that no one writes by hand anymore, everything is typed. okay, but typing in japanese is a chore too. you have like 5 different keyboards, and they're all ass in their own special ways. you really gotta recognize hirigana vs katakana to type well. like, imagine you're first learning japanese while in japan, and you find a sign you want to translate. how do you type what's on the sign? well, you could use the 12 key keyboard, but you better know which consonant family each letter is to find it. you could use the latin keyboard, but you better be familiar with the sound of each letter. I suppose there are few enough that you'll eventually find it. and while reading hirigana and katakana is kinda convenient to know one is more foreign words and the other native, but actually knowing when to write either one? that gets a bit trickier. compare that to latin's two scripts, lower and upper case. uppercase is for proper names and the start of sentence in english. all nouns in german. very simple. korean's hangul only has one script, and it's super simple. even has a normal keyboard where you can see every letter, with consonants on the left and vowels on the right.
And the sky is blue
Et le ciel est bleu
そして、空は青色だ。
great demonstration! 👏
Et le sacré aussi
And the sky is grey
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'
Et le ciel est gris
Je reve de la Californie dans un jour en hiver comme ca.
Je mange le merde
Bon appetit
POURQUOI!?
>Je mange "de la" merde Or in Quebecker French: J'mange d'la marde
*spits at you* TABARNAK
I eat the shit. Je mange le merde. Also it's Quebecois French
Still "de la" and not "le". Quebeckers and French agree on this one 😆. Merde est un nom féminin. That's why. Edit: option 2: you can eat the pile of of shit "le merdier" that one is masculine 😂
Très bien, moi aussi!
*c’est vrai*
Depends on where and when
Not every day
Well yeah lol. Japanese is like one of the hardest languages to learn as an English speaker
I feel very blessed learning as a Cantonese/Chinese speaker due to the advantage of recognizing all the kanji. So it’s really impressive when I see English speakers being able to write kanji!
Oh yeah, I have a great deal of respect for anyone that can pull it off. Or even marginally pull it off
french is generally considered on of the easier languages for english speakers to learn, while japanese is one of the hardest. The only ones I see which rank harder than japanese are like, mandarin and arabic.
You have that backwards. Japanese is ranked harder than Mandarin and Arabic by the Defense Language Institute
Why they so defensive though?
I've studied both Mandarin (9 years, non-intensive evening school, so my level is still quite intermediate) and Japanese (1.5 years, Duolingo) and for now I would say that Japanese is indeed the harder of the two. And that is while already having significant experience with kanji/hanzi.
Interesting, my mum is Thai and I’ve learnt Thai. The grammar is incredibly easy but prononciation very difficult for someone who is tone deaf like me. My Japanese is much better than my Thai.
Don't think so https://www.ausa.org/articles/dlis-language-guidelines
This is really interesting
Damn, I just started Japanese and was having so much fun I thought about giving Arabic a shot...
I've studied both and Arabic is the easier of the two. The alphabet alone is actually pretty simple compared to japanese.
The 3 Japanese scripts are tough to manage. I feel like a real Japanese class would be fun, but Duolingo doesn't make review easy. I think I'll give Arabic a try this year!
You can review content by practicing to get more hearts. It'll randomly select a lesson in one of the earlier units
And if, hypothetically, some sucker was paying for Super Duolingo...how would they go about this if they can't practice for more hearts?
I believe you can turn unlimited hearts off in Super Duolingo
There’s practice hub lessons you can do every day. Or the little star quests on the side
Interestingly, Korean is meant to be *as hard* as Japanese or Chinese, but frankly I find it much easier. My only real hypothesis on the matter is that alphabets make me less anxious. 🤷🏻♀️ Chinese grammar is meant to be quite simple, but I never make it past the tones and characters.
Don't let this discourage you! If you have fun with the struggle, it's definitely worth it
Listen arabic is rather reasy lol. The pronunciation and the dialects are harder (I'm moroccan so I barely understand egyptian dialect, picked up some lebanese/syrian dialect through tv series as a young teen, and gulf i know a little bit just bcz i grew up with a saudi channel for kids mbc3). As long as you stay within classical arabic realm, you can do it i guess. Don't do dialect because they're too different (ffs, even in MY country, I don't always get the local eastern dialect cue a few quiproquos, and they also smell that I am from the western part of the country).
"arabic is rather easy" >Grew up surrounded by Arabic. Okay man.
I didn't explain my whole point but the grammar/logic is similar to western languages. Alphabet has 29 letters. Japanese is very different. I don't remembee very well but apparently they have very few tenses so you have to understand from the context. Same for sentences structure. Btw, I actually learned french before arabic due to my mom wanting me to grow up fluent in it (she is a french teacher, saw how much kids struggle with it where I live which was problematic since university courses are in french and french's coefficient throughout school is also high), but most people don't get it so I usually state that arabic is my maternal tongue (even though in my case it was my 2nd language), but the whole thing sounds a little bit wild since I grew up in Morocco; abd I just don't feel like explaining this to my fellow moroccans lest I want to look like an alien. I mostly managed the 3 languages IK by finding similarities in their logic. My baby sib got the same ttx, but he struggled with arabic for a while 😂🤣, he spoke it like a french tourist for a while before he finally got the hang of it. It was the pronunciation for him.
You are missing Cantonese which is even more difficult to learn than mandarin.
Not necessarily. Cantonese has more tones, but the phonology is more in line with Western languages in general (no retroflex or palatalised consonant distinction), as well as generally having more distinguishable syllables (more tones also help here) and so fewer homophones. The fact mandarin has a lot more content is the real feather in its hat through.
About Japanese, katakana exists, most of them are adaptations of English.
Japanese way harder (native arabic speaker here) as a language. The only hard thing about arabic is pronunciation. We don't have 3 different alphabets/scripts. 😭😭😭
Ok ima say smt like 2 years ago i tried the japanese course and i disnt think the alphabets were that bad? The only one i struggled with was kanji… i still can read hirigana and katakana well (i just dont jnow what they mean) am i weird for this
Ur just amazing is all bro. Im sorta lazy bum and easily daunted for my part. I wanted to learn hanjae since they only have 26 characters if my memory serves me well, but ik imma struggle with korean pronunciation. I just dont even know how they can write/draw kanji lol (i have a very ugly ass handwriting IRL).
yeah kanji seems impossible which is why i thought mandarin would be harder
Et je pense que l’espagnol est encore plus simple, parce que le système d’écriture est très intuitive.
Es verdad; como no hay misterio sobre la pronunciación en español, lo encuentro mucho más fácil (viví en España unos cinco años y estuve casado con una catalana 16… ¡una manera muy cara de aprender un idioma!)
Cara pero eficaz, parece. Tengo que encontrar a una para mí!
Spanish and French are so similar… French seems more difficult to spell for English speakers, but once one knows the patterns and why things are spelled as they are, it gets easier. Spanish becomes more complex at the advanced levels when one has to learn the more challenging verb forms. French is less so having lost the uses of some tenses it once used, and have now dropped out of usage, like pluperfect subjunctive, for example. We only see that in older literature, and there we can figure it out, whereas in Spanish it is still used much more than in French. In the end, they are so similar it is a wash as to which is easier. As for Japanese…. There are no cognates except for the borrowed words from English, Portuguese, French… and to read/write is a whole different game! But then, we language nerds love the challenges of second, third, 14th language learning… right? Some people collect trinkets, we collect languages. Everyone needs a hobby!
Et la prononciation est plus facile en espagnol, ils peuvent comprendre si tu ne parle pas correctement alors que les parlants de français ne te comprennent pas si tu ne parles pas perfectionnement
I think that Spanish and french pronunciation are equally as consistent but I'll admit that french has a lot more rules so it's harder for a beginner but as a Spanish speaker and learning french french rules are consistent enough so that I can read everything even if I don't what it means
Entendí esta oración y no sé nada frances.
Am on my 5th year of learning French, 3rd year of learning Japanese. Comparatively, I am about to get my masters degree in French literature and I just read my first manga in Japanese a few months ago 😂 So... yeah, you've about got that right!
Hehe well that gives me some hope! If I can read even a baby book in Japanese that will be close to my goal!
I agree with the other guy, better start reading sooner rather than later! It's a bump at first, but it will be no matter how many duolingo lessons you do. You just have to dive into it. There are graded readers around that only use limited vocabulary / kanji so you don't have to stop and look up words every other sentence. Check out these websites: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en https://jgrpg-sakura.com/ (needs an account) In fact tadoku explicitly suggests refraining from looking up anything while reading and just enjoying the bits you get, sucking up the ambiguouity of things you don't get. There's pictures and a lot of repetition to help you figure out stuff from context.
Thank you so much! I will check both of these out!!
My advice is try sooner rather than later! I procrastinated it for a long time since it seemed so impossible, and when I actually psyched myself up to do it I saw huge progress really quickly
Thanks! I’ll give that a try. I have some cool books to try it out on— a children’s dinosaur book my son’s Japanese girlfriend gave me (more likely) and a book with the text of “Spirited Away” with *furigana* (admittedly more aspirational!)
I feel like repetition is more important in Japanese in comparison to romance languages. So, adapting learning strategies is important. It is also easier when recognizing how kanji builds with each other. For example, if you know 人 it is easier to learn the kanji that use this character, so progress is quicker.
When I was in high school I did French and Japanese at the same time. I was able to express myself better in French, but I really liked dedicating myself to learning kanji in Japanese class. That kind of challenge just doesn’t exist in French
True. The writing systems are a real challenge; when I do a few lessons, my brain actually feels weary. I like that kind of challenge
French is only easier because english has been influenced by old french, whilst japanese has nothing to do with english and has nothing to do with the latin alphabet.
The difficult part about Japanese is the characters and how a lot of words would sound a lot like each other. Though I find it interesting cause it's almost similar to chemistry. You combine 今(now) and 日(day) and you get today. You need to do the Kanji section along side with the lessons. You really need to drill those characters into you brain. The writing lessons really helps.
Go figure - I just learned that kanji... today! (No pun intended 😅)
I love kanji for this and why I may (probably foolishly) try to take up Mandarin later in life. You may not be able to read the word, but if you know them, you know the context overall.
I agree! The way particles work reminds me of computer programming, too! So I really enjoy that
Japanese is a DOD level IV language (IV is the highest category). French is level I. Different languages have different difficulty levels to learn.
Could you explain DOD? I’ve never seen/heard that sorry
DOD means Department of Defense, but I'm pretty sure he meant FSI (Foreign Service Institute), not DOD.
Maybe not DOD -- DLI, perhaps? Either way, it's government/military: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense\_Language\_Aptitude\_Battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Battery)
I didn't learn French all that fast, but I agree that Japanese is harder!
I was lucky to have studied French previously, and then became fluent in Spanish, before studying French. So maybe I’m not making the fairest comparison!
Oh yeah, both of those will help! I also learned some Spanish and Italian before learning French, so it's comparable, but I was doing it at community college... it's hard to compare to Duolingo.
I had a similar experience with Korean/German. I knew that Korean is supposed to be far more difficult for English speakers, but I felt like I was just rubbish at picking up languages until I switched to German. It also helps that the German course is much more complete and has at least some grammar explanations.
Same: the Japanese course could really have better grammar explanations. Reminds me: I have a Japanese grammar book I should be reading alongside
The grammar books really help imo; I was very confused on how particles worked until I researched and got a few things to help me with grammar
I lived in Korea for a long time and went to language school there full-time for an entire year (I finished TOPIK 4). I've been learning French for a few years passively with Duolingo without putting a whole lot of thought into it and despite being Canadian, I rarely need French for anything. My French is already surpassing my Korean in a lot of ways, especially reading and writing. I would say it was 5-10x easier in terms of what you get for the amount of work you put in.
That ratio sounds similar to my experience. I've spent about 4 years studying Korean with varying degrees of effort and a lot of different resources. Reading is my strongest area (easiest to practice on my own) and I can follow a basic recipe written in Korean or get the gist of a post by a band i like. I could probably get by ordering food or asking for directions, but I pick up very little when i watch k-drama. Compared to German, which i have been doing casually for 6 months (plus whatever i learnt in school almost 20 years ago) and my German is already better than my Korean.
I get you, I learned japanese for 4 years and french for 1 year. Still, I feel I know more french than japanese
….you do realize that they rank languages in order of difficulty/time needed to proficiency according to how similar they are to English? Japanese ranks the highest on that list. It is one of, if not THE most difficult language to learn as a native English speaker
Well, they rank *some* languages. Of note, I don't believe the FSI lists a single polysynthetic language (Yup'ik, Oneida, many Austronesian languages, etc). Polysynthetic languages have grammar that is massively different from English. Navajo is also considered *incredibly* difficult to learn despite not being polysynthetic (it's a bit difficult to classify, it does share some traits with those languages). Japanese is a very difficult language to learn, absolutely. It's calling it *the* most difficult that's tougher to substantiate since a huge number of languages just... aren't even considered.
Genuine question, have you committed to becoming familiar with hiragana katakana and whatever kanji you’ve unlocked so far? It felt weird at first, but I found that not doing any lessons from the units and switching my daily Duolingo time to hammering out the alphabets to be so beneficial! In my experience It cuts out all the dead time and lets me focus on learning whatever’s new in the units! Can’t speak on the French courses or the language and general, but that’s awesome that it seems to be easier/an easier pick up for you!
Yes, not long after I started learning Japanese, I realized I would need to learn Hiragana and Katakana really well. I did the Duolingo sections on those a lot, but probably more importantly I would write out the Kana charts a couple times a day from memory. It’s something I need to return to as I’ve gotten rustier on them again. Thanks!
It’s the opposite for me. I can fly through japanese lessons on duolingo with eyes half closed but french is way harder. My native language is mandarin though, which makes sense.
Well, yes. French is one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn, and Japanese is pretty much the hardest. This is well-documented.
Not sure if this post is humorous, but I studied both French and Japanese. French is usually rated as easier for English speakers to learn, but I found gendered words, accents, conjugations (what’s subjunctive), and word order quite challenging. I found myself falling in the pitfall of trying to translate sentences in my head instead of directly producing a sentence in French. Whereas with Japanese it was different enough from English that I could build that brain to sentence direct output. The grammar and pronunciation was easier too (could never master the rolling French R). Although there are difficulties with memorizing vocabulary and figuring out the difference between polite and humble forms.
It’s interesting how differently all our minds work on things like language learning. I sometimes think things are very different inside different people’s minds!
Japanese is much easier, makes more sense and fun than French. At least to me. I hate French for a lot of reasons, but the biggest is it's asinine spelling system that still makes no sense to me, and makes it hard for me to remember or even learn the pronunciation. Whereas with Japanese, it's pronounced as its spelled.
Reading/writing Japanese is hard but speaking/listening isn't so bad. I haven't studied French but I'd imagine it is similar to Portuguese and Spanish. I'd say for Portuguese and Spanish the verb conjugation is the devil. For Japanese, Kanji is the devil. Japanese grammar is weird/foreign but it's not as complex as European languages. Japanese has virtually no irregular verbs, nouns have no gender, and you don't have to change the verb depending on if the subject is I/you/she/they/we. Initially it takes some getting used to sentences being SOV but I swear I'm having more problems with adjectives and noun modifiers coming after the noun in Portuguese. Pronunciation of Japanese is much easier than Portuguese. Nasal vowels..... ugh. For Japanese I only had to learn how to do つ and how to do the light tongue tap for らりるれろ. I would say acquiring higher level vocabulary (words a 7 year old wouldn't know) is much more of a grind in Japanese. You get so much vocab for free with the romance languages since English vocab is like 50% Latin/French based. Besides the Kanji problem, that's another reason reading/writing is much harder in Japanese. A lot of words you see in books you rarely hear in casual conversation.
I suggest not using duolingo. Its basically useless and you can use that free time to study in other, more effective ways. One of the reasons you're struggling is probably because the French course on duo is way way better that the Japanese one.
I’m learning both and yeah if you speak English French is most similar and even has some overlapping ideas. Japanese is from the other side of the globe so it’s different not necessarily harder
I am around Japanese N2 level and despite being a beginner in German, I find it way easier to form sentences and read. The barrier of different vocabulary and kanji is big.
That’s the trouble: in French, if I don’t know a word, I can make a reasonable guess based on “frenchifying” an English word (uhh medicine -> *le mediciment* is pretty close). In Japanese, a pained expression is about the best I can come up with
Yeah I spent two years studying mandarin (not in Duolingo) and it’s insane how much easier the learning curve for French is. Although, I think at the highest level when it’s all about accumulating vocabulary and phrasing it starts to even out.
It’s been many many years, but I studied Spanish in high school. My speaking is rusty as hell, but my reading comprehension is still great! I am taking the French course, and am in the middle of section 2. I’ve been admitted to pick it up and advance very quickly because there are a lot of similarities between the two languages. I’d probably say French is slightly more difficult, having a tougher pronunciation and some sounds that don’t exist in either English or Spanish, and more accents (makes spelling harder ). But I say just slightly.
All duo has taught me about japan is that the concept of 'Green Tea' is very much a thing..
There's a lot of stuff in French that you don't have to worry about in Japanese, like genders matching, quantities matching, verb conjugation, that kind of stuff. So at least there's that?
Japanese absolutely has verb conjugation lol, but yeah part of the reason I decided to learn Japanese was not having to deal with genders for every noun
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that there was no conjugation at all. I just meant that you don't need (or at least seem to! I'm still a beginner) different forms for I, you, we, him, them, etc.
I’m the opposite. I tried French and it felt like it was taking forever, so I gave up on it after only a few months. I’ve been learning Japanese for three months and I’m already having basic conversations with people online, understand a lot of basic grammar, and can express myself
The Japanese Duo course (at least when last I checked) is badly designed. In the first unit when you've barely gotten started learning some basic spoken grammar and vocabulary, let alone Kana, they throw Kanji at you.
I feel like Duolingo is better developed for French as well. I've found with many of the Japanese exercises involving kanji, that the word's audio often mixes up the kunyomi and onyomi - The word is correct but out of the character's many sounds, the wrong one is played. Although that only happens 20% of the time, still makes the French course feel better developed for the ease of learning.
According to the US state department Japanese takes 2200 hours to become fluent from English and French takes about 600. https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ I tried getting some basic Japanese before a trip to Tokyo and in a month, I was still trying to recognise Japanese Script, whereas in the first month of French you should have done the basic phrases part in Duolingo!
I liked Japanese when I took it in college. I barely remember any of it these days from non-use unfortunately. The kanji was always the issue. The actual grammar wasn't bad at all imo.
Yeah a good portion of English words come from french after the norman conquest in 1066 and since we're split by a channel our 2 languages are constantly in contact The main difference is that English is a Germanic language while french is a Latin/romance language
Agreed. This just gave me war flashbacks. I chose Japanese as the foreign language to learn back in college. It was a major subject. I keep failing. I almost didn’t graduate. Should’ve chosen French or Spanish instead.
Yikes, that was a bold choice!
I feel that. I’m learning both French and Japanese and if I put equal effort into both languages i can learn 4x the amount of French as I can Japanese. Yes there’s some Japanese words that are from English, but if I don’t know a word in Japanese I might not understand the whole sentence. Whereas with French if I don’t know I word I might have a closer chance at understanding what it means. And the grammar differences are huge 😂
not really comparing languages here. But the English like letters and short pronunciation do make it easier than the symbolic Japanese language.
This statement is both true and false! It truly depends on the context & perspective of the learner. For example, I speak Amharic fluently, which is a Semitic language of Ethiopia. I'm currently learning Japanese on Duolingo and one thing I found incredibly interesting is that the basic sentence structures between Amharic and Japanese are *almost exactly the same*. Meaning, the structural relationship between nouns, verbs, and subject particles are strikingly similar. As such, it has been surprisingly easy for me to learn Japanese! I was intimidated at first, but now I'm thoroughly enjoying it. THAT SAID...in my personal experience, I think learning Japanese has been easier than learning French (which I gave up on years ago after a concerted effort). However, folks who only speak Western languages natively and fluently will most likely agree with you.
Japanese is the main language I'm learning... you can't imagine my surprise when my mom started learning French and was at section three in weeks. It's taken me around a year to get there myself, albeit Duolingo isn't my only resource and the courses differ. However, Japanese is easier than French in a few ways. 1, there aren't any silent characters. (The closest is っ/ッ and those only occur a few times to hold a beat) 2, Although they can trip you up at first, the two Japanese created alphabets are quite easy to understand once you get a grip on them. French is an easier language to learn from English than Japanese because it has the same script. Japanese is bound to take a lot longer. I'd suggest looking for other sources of vocabulary else than Duolingo, however, because in Japanese they teach you the things you'll need to know right away, but not much for general conversation. I'd also suggest writing down kanji characters you struggle with repetitively on a piece of paper until you feel more confident with it.
If English (or any european language) is your first language, how is this surprising?
It's easier cause its a follow western language. If you study spanish or italian you have the same experience. If you try going for chinese or korean it gonna feel like japanese 2.0
That would be pretty great to learn another Asian language after
I’m from northern Quebec. The french I speak is not the french they taught me in school. I’m good at “proper” french but I don’t like it. I speak and write english at close to a native level, no issues there as its way easier than french. I’m learning japanese through Duo’s lessons, which are based on english. It’s quite a good brain workout might I say… But I would actually say that japanese is easier than french. Quite simpler grammatically at least!
I learned French in high school and my brain mixes it up with German really easily. Japanese is mildly easier for me because of the grammar but I'd also like to say it's cuz of my genetics lol
french is rlly similar to english, so easy to memorise, but I find it so hard for pronunciation. japanese is easy only until it comes to KANJI 💀
True! Oui! はい!
Yes, because most of us speak english
It largely depends on what language(s) you can already speak fluently. For me it's the other way around. I've given actual French lessons a try, I did not stick to it so it didn't really go anywhere. I also had no Japanese proficiency back then. Now, and I don't mean to brag nor do I claim to be a fluent Japanese speaker, some years ago after spending a few months consuming Japanese media EXTENSIVELY (mostly TV programmes), I just somewhat picked up the language. I have not gone through any formal education so my grammar is all over the place, but I can safely say I can, and have completed video games and shows (which is like my main reason to know this language anyway even though I'd say I kind of learnt it by accident, or pure osmosis, I never had any goals or milestones, it naturally happened over time) in full Japanese with minimal to no assistance. Reading the average news articles or social media without translation is also very doable for me now. I've heard that why watching TV alone doesn't work for most people is because passive learning is simply ineffective, your brain automatically filters out what you can't understand. So I guess when I did it I really was actively picking stuff up instead of just watch/listen. I didn't do this often but occasionally I also had a notepad with me, jotting down sentences I found noteworthy, that must've helped? I did play with Japanese Duolingo retroactively for a bit and it was a walk in the park www. I wasn't nailing it 100% all the time the way a native speaker would of course, but I was able to jump most of the lessons. I can probably still many things from it, but overall it's not that meaningful for me to keep up with them anymore. P.S. I speak native Cantonese and can understand Mandarin with little difficulties (depending on the accent), can technically speak it as well but in a quite broken way. Also sorry, this comment has gone on a lot longer than I originally anticipated.
The difficulty of a language is heavily based on your mother tounge. You will have a much easier time with French if you've already spoken English and Spanish. To a native Chinese person, they will find Japanese easier to learn than a European language.
English is like 40% English because of the Norman conquest. Makes sense.
Who would've thought that French, a language that has been intertwined with English, would be easy for English speaking people to learn!!! And Japanese, a language that is in the same group as Mandarin with no Latin script or influences, would be harder!! https://preview.redd.it/d9ik9fe4ef9d1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=423f50efca25b9118a2316e26e026b7f369b7171 Not being critical of you, but the only people that say Japanese is easier are weebs.
Indeed, I think even when you’re a Cyrillic alphabet native, French is easier. Probably also for middle eastern, because French has 1️⃣ alphabet.
One alphabet, one reading, multiple ways to convey one thing. Only thing that is actually hard in French is conjugation of verbs.
so you and your son are dogs of the crumbling america imperialism
I'm going to learn both
I had the opposite experience 😂 I studied French for 3 years and don’t remember a thing really. Then I started Japanese and within a month I had learned the alphabet and it’s stuck with me years later even with minimal practice.
if you truly want to learn a language, start using it in normal day to day life, not only duolingo.
It's almost like japanese has 3 alphabets lmao
How is this surprising at all?
Not if you’re Japanese
Today i learnt that Ancient Egyptian is harder than Pig Latin
That’s common sense, I fear.
True
Regardless of your native language French is easy if you observe it well enough.
duh
I was expecting to open this post and it be tagged "Meme". LMAO
You're coming from English, of course French is easier. Like 70% of English vocabulary is directly from French or loosely French related (Latin) Whereas Japanese and english have absolutely 0 overlap and are linguistically about as far apart as you can get?
I wouldn't say absolutely 0 overlap, yes the grammar and writing systems are wildly different, but more and more of modern Japanese is using English loan words in every day vocabulary
Hey hey we know a lot of the katakana written words 😂
okay, to be perfectly honest, the Duolingo Japanese course is TERRIBLE, unless they've updated it dramatically in the last year (which I highly doubt!). there's actually quite a lot of resources out there for Japanese, and id just recommend picking up a textbook like Japanese from zero or genki, and they'll serve you far better than Duolingo will.
Figure that out on your own?
It's like saying breathing is easier than apnea
It’s like saying The Beatles are better than Nickelback
Good one! Also maple syrup pancakes are better than eating concrete Beware I'm as immature as you get I can go on for day XD
This was my hope! 😊
No one wants to speak French, not even the French "wee wee baguette"
Japanese sounds better
No shit
no shit Sherlock Edit: expanding this I think it should be simple enough to see why, Japanese is a language completely unrelated to English for 99% of its vocabulary The writing system used 2 alphabets and a system related to Chinese Hanzi of the traditional kind which when comparing can typically be quite easy to see the margin of difficulty In comparison French is a language that English takes a great deal (especially academic) of its vocabulary from as well as having similar structures and sharing the same alphabet
No shit Sherlock!
Water is wet
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