Submitted 2 weeks ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
Also what’s the best resource to learn?
Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.
So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.
Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).
I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)
Yur Inglick iz turrbul!
[kj]
My weeb ass: My time has come.
I did it, and for the record my native language has absolutely nothing in common with Japanese. I started with Duolingo and kept at it until I could power through easy manga, at which point and I started doing that. The good news is that if you can power through the early bits, your entertainment (assuming it's in Japanese) will supplement and eventually replace Here are the things I think I did right:
Be willing to invest serious time into studying and/or consuming comprehensible material (also known as immersion). At what point it becomes "not worth it" is up to you, but I'd aim for at least an hour a day.
Watch anime often and attempt to understand what you're hearing (this is separate from studying). You'll fail most of the time at first, but this keeps your ear open so you improve your listening without doing much if any extra work. It also helps you keep track of your progress, since the better you get the more you'll understand. I took a half-year break and when I came back I found my Japanese had improved at least in part because I was watching anime in the interim.
Don't fall for the studying trap. At some point, and probably earlier than you expect, you'll have to drop actual studying material and focus your efforts on immersion. I started by reading a manga called Yotsubato after getting to conditoinals on Duolingo, but really any manga with furigana works. If you find something other than manga you like better then go for that, but you need something and it needs to at least keep you on your toes language-wise and still be ultimately comprehensible. Humans learn language by recognizing patterns within copious volumes of content, not by rationally analyzing those patterns; that latter stuff is for linguists.
Keep challenging yourself. It's easy to think you're not ready to advance to the next level, but you should accept that the transition will be painful anyway and often try your hand at more advanced material (meaning immersion material here, as I said don't bother with advanced studying material). In my case, I thought my Japanese was plateauing after sticking with one thing for too long, but after I read my first light novel I improved ridiculously fast. We're talking serious improvement in a matter of weeks here. You're likely to underestimate the level of material you can digest, so you should take that into account when making decisions.
Note regarding your native language: I speak basic Chinese and Chinese and Japanese are different enough that you'll be almost no better than an English native speaker when it comes to fundamentally understanding the language. However, the writing system and the prevalence of Sino-Japanese words mean that you'll have a leg up in guessing the meaning of words you don't know when reading, especially after you learn to reverse engineer character simplifications. For example, you'll see something like 解説 and be like "oh that's just 解说." At least coming from the other direction this is super convenient, but it's obviously no substitute for actually learning the language and it won't help you at all when it comes to listening. You also get the joy of seeing exactly how the Japanese butchered Chinese words, so... uh... good luck. You'll have fun with 样/様. So to directly answer your questions:
YMMV, but I don't think it's hard at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it's no more or less difficult than English.
If you can commit then no, but obviously yes if you give up in three weeks.
This isn't as important a decision as you'd expect, but Duolingo will do fine.
I actually hear occasional similarities between Japanese and Cantonese. For example: “world” is “世界”, “Sai Gai” in Cantonese, and its “Sekai” in Japanese. My ears immediately picked it up when I watched Steins;Gate, lol.
I actually hear occasional similarities between Japanese and Cantonese. For example: "world" is "世界", "Sai Gai" in Cantonese, and its "Sekai" in Japanese.
Wow, that's a lot closer than the Mandarin Shi Jie. Anyway that's one of those Sino-Japanese words; they're kind of like the English equivalent of French loanwords so there's a whole lot of them. Also I guess I have to take back my "it won't help you with listening" bit if Sino-Japanese words are that close to their Cantonese counterparts.
I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.
I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (fr m the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday japanese.
I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.
Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other.
Ayyy fellow Canto speaker on the same boat
I don’t really watch anime but I want to read Japanese text. I’m currently 2 months in following the Tofugu guide. I spent about a week on memorizing Hiragana and Katakana, and have been grinding Kanjis and vocabularies on Anki since then. At some point I also read the Japanese sentence structure guide from 8020japanese out of curiosity.
Since I’m a native Cantonese speaker, learning Kanji is rather trivial, so I mostly spend my time learning both Onyomi (Chinese pronunciation) and Kunyomi (Japanese pronunciation).
I am at a point where I can read some simple sentences and guess some words base on Kanji (for example はじめる means “start” on my Japanese Wii), but I definitely still have a long way to go before I can do anything fluent. If you watch a decent amount of anime, chances are you can probably learn faster than me.
I am learning Japanese since almost 3 years now. It’s a life’s goal of mine to be able to understand the language well.
I sometimes watch anime, I really like music by Ado, and I come across Japanese often.
I don’t really have a concrete reason for having started. A friend of mine learned Japanese in middle school seriously which gave me the idea the first time.
It’s safe to say that it’s a tremendous effort. You need to work on it for many years, especially if you have phases where you can’t or don’t want to learn, or work full time, etc.
If it’s just to watch anime, probably not worth it, unless you’re a total ween maybe. I’m my case, I started learning for the sake of it because it’s kind of fun and I found more interests in Japanese after starting to understand a few things.
Ressource wise, I’d recommend taking a look at the tofu guide to learning Japanese, that covers it much better than I could.
Some more resources that I use and really like:
You got to be in it for the long run to be able to see any success.
I attempted this. I enrolled on an evening course and followed it for a year, doing all the exercises and so on. After one year, I had a rudimentary understanding of the simplest symbols (no kanji) and could do a minimal baby talk. From there, there is a lot of vocabulary. I abandoned. It’s not an easy path, but maybe missing other languages in the same family helps. For me, Japanese was my first non-European language. Fascinating but haaaaard!
The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.
The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.
Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).
Hey I actually did that in my uni years because I wanted to experience manga in the original way. I guess it depends on how fast you absorb stuff like vocab but if you’re already used to listening to Japanese convo, it could take a few months to master the grammar (that’s the easy part imho). Then the hard part would be the writing (which you could avoid entirely since you’re focused on anime but I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run since there’s a lot of written stuff in anime as well) and vocab. If you study a little every day (say 1 hour), it would take 6 month to understand basic stuff (like teenage shonen) and then a few years for more advanced stuff. That’s just my two cents In my case, took me 2-3 years to actually read shonen manga but I still struggle with furigana-less manga
No, no one has ever done this :P
Japanese can be difficult to native english speakers from what I hear but I don’t personally have experience enough with the language to tell you.
Generally I would say learning an entire language for the sake of consuming a specific media, especially a language not widely spoken outside of its country of origin, is a waste of time yes. At the very least, it is not usually motivating enough to get you to stick to learning that language long term.
However, I don’t mean to discourage you. Language learning is still fun and teaches you a lot about its culture of origin and their values. In my experience language learning apps like duolingo (especially duolingo these days) are not the way to go. Buy some textbooks, there are tons of japanese language learning youtubers who can point you to good ones, then go on some chat sites and practice what you are learning. Don’t just watch anime, listen to japanese music too, try to pick out what they are saying as you listen.
🦈🍆🎤⬇️
has anyone else attempted this.
Yes. Every Western Weeb for starters.
Hey, us Eastern weebs do it too!
Duty noted, and please accept my apologies. Consider it a consequence of my ignorance.
I have friends who learned japanese quite easily. Granted, they where living in japan so that’s way easier being deep into easy practice and daily exposure.
But grammar is quite easy, as well as phonetics (that actually depends on your mother language, for us it is at least).
Of course don’t learn the traditional symbols, or don’t learn how to write it at all, since that would be useless to your goal. If that is even possible I don’t know.
Disclaimer: I didn’t study japanese
I have friends who learned japanese quite easily.
Easily? 🧐
Granted, they where living in japan
Oh. Lmao. Of course. 😆
Hey you know btw I’m Chinese and I learned English very easily. How? It’s actually very simple. I immigrated to a English-speaking country when I was a child (with family).
xD
Me and my GF are currently doing this. Some recommendations from personal experience:
Lastly, no, it is not a waste of time. Apart from anime, a new language means new ways of thinking, of challenging yourself, of being able to experience people and culture through a new lense, and potentially increasing job opportunities.
Plus if you ever end up visiting Japan, it really comes in handy.
Feel free to ask any followup things that I’ve forgotten about…
Absolutely agreed on learning to write Kanji, as well. Especially given that even PARTIAL learning will teach you how to recognize the writing of characters you’re not familiar with, which is critically important for being able to look them up in a dictionary.
Do you need to be able to reproduce every single Kanji you know? No. Should you spend time on learning how to write them? Absolutely, I’d 100% recommend it.
What this lovely person said.
Also, and maybe I am alone here, but when I said learning to write, I really meant with a pen, on paper (or a tablet, I guess), not through an app where you need to smush your fingers in approximately the right place for the line to snap to the correct position; that does not really translate to being able to write.
No one actually provided good immersion material Check @iroironanihongo on Youtube.
Check specifically for the playlist named: [BEGINNER] いろいろなアニメ
It’s not an easy language to master even if you lived full-time in Japan. Everything about the language is needlessly complicated. The grammar, the writing system, the social conventions that influence word choices. Anime Japanese is its own kettle of fish. Overly colloquial or stylized samurai talk - neither of which you’ll get taught in most language courses.
Now, you could be a savant who picks it up in no time. More likely you’ll be in it for a couple of weeks and give up - or life. It’s not a bad hobby. Even beyond Duolingo you’ll find plenty of resources online and lots of it free.
Everything about the language is needlessly complicated.
I mean, there is no language that isn't needlessly complicated. At least Japanese doesn't have gendered nouns.
I mean, I thought Japanese was super straightforward compared to English. I’ve been speaking English for three goddamn decades and I:
Consider the needlessly complicated to be applied on top of a general baseline of needlessly complicated that applies to any language.
While they don’t have gendered nouns, they have something equally unnerving for the beginner learner. Their noun classes evolve mostly around the nature of shapes and sizes, which becomes an issue the moment you need to count anything. For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms. And don’t get me started on the calendar. English is relatively unsophisticated by comparison.
toki pona li pona.
The US military rates Japanese as one of the harder languages to learn, with its internal course taking 64 weeks. As others have said, it will probably take you years to learn even with some knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin.
I had a friend who was a computer science student and did an additional major in Japanese just so he could read manga in original language. It can be done but requires a lot of dedication.
If you are a native English speaker, then learning Germanic and Romance languages will be easy because they have much in common. With Japanese, there’s no real evolutionary commonality so you really have to just learn a whole new system that doesn’t match your expectations–and from scratch. Example:
1,352
English: one-thousand three-hundred fifty-two Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two
Just the conception of how numbers work is different. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to do this, it would be fantastic. Just know that you have to develop a lot of new intuitions.
Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two
That sounds like: 一千 三百 五十 二 (In both Chinese and Japanese Kanji)
“thousand(s)” is one word, there is no separate “place” word lol, doesn’t seem that different from english tbh
I think the better way to highlight the difference with English is the 萬 (10,000) 億 (100,000,000) which becomes the new place value instead of “milllion” (1,000,000) and “billion” (1,000,000,000). 千萬 (thousand-[wan/man]; aka: thousand-[ten thousand]; aka: 10,000,000) become a new word that would be slightly more challenging for English-Only speakers.
If you have any fluency in Chinese, Japanese will be a little easier.
Language learning difficulty;
https://blog.rosettastone.com/the-complete-list-of-language-difficulty-rankings/
https://www.ecinnovations.com/blog/top-10-most-difficult-languages-in-the-world/
I suspect this will depend somewhat on your level of knowledge in those other languages. Japanese is broadly considered a very difficult language for native English speakers, and it’s pretty substantially different in many ways from English. Learning it is indeed possible, but takes a long time and a substantial commitment of energy. However, those with a decent fluency in Chinese (I use this rather than Cantonese/Mandarin because I don’t understand the nuances well enough to speak intelligently as to their relation to Japanese-learning) or Korean (and probably many other languages) will have a much easier time with the transition compared to those with a primarily-English background. Additionally, Japanese Kanji have a relationship with Chinese characters, and so learning the Kanji is easier for one with a meaningful Chinese background who has had to learn those characters already.
For some context, one can attend Language School in Japan, which is a half-time (~20-25hr/wk) course load taught with full immersion learning. That is to say, the course is taught almost entirely in Japanese itself, but doesn’t require any knowledge of the language to participate, as you’ll work up from a near-zero understanding. In many of these classes, the first few weeks might lean a small amount on English to explain certain concepts, but the complexity of English required is very low. It takes about 2 years of these courses in order to reach a “basic” fluency. Many who take the 2-year course take the JLPT (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test) and study up for the exam can test into the N2 category, which is what you’d minimally need in order to attend school or seek a job in Japan.
Learning on your own, I’d probably say you should expect either to spend many hours a day on study, and/or to spend multiple years before you’d reach the point of being able to understand a significant amount of the anime you consume. Learning the grammar and vocabulary are one thing, but actually consuming content in the language is an important part of learning, and jumping from nothing to full-on anime is a HELL of a jump in complexity.
As to how to go about it, there are tons of excellent resources available online for paths to take. Most will point you to various textbooks to work through, which is a pretty decent strategy IMO. The Genki series is one that is often recommended for those not working from a class, since it discusses the material in English.
Minor nitpick: While Chinese fluency will put you in a marginally better position when learning Japanese compared to a monolingual English speaker, it's really nothing significant. Doesn't really go into the same category as Korean, which is indeed very similar to Japanese. Additionally the only famous language that substantially helps with Japanese learning is Korean, with an honorable mention going to Turkish.
My experience trying to learn other languages has been that it’s a lifelong process.
Japan’s writing system is rather complex. It has three primary forms and mixed together. Your familiarity with Cantonese & Mandarin may help with kanji (but also be a source of confusion, as they share some similarities).
However, their speech has regional dialects and some of their phrases requires an understanding of their history and culture.
The monogatari series has been cited as extremely dense to understand for foreigners, but would be an excellent candidate for practicing your comprehension skills.
Side thought: How do you feel about the dub of this series? It’s often credited as being very high quality.
Not OP, but: watched Haruhi a while back in English Dub, because there’s no German one. It was ok. The main POV character’s monotone voice was fitting in a fun way, but almost everyone else still has this fake energy to it (esp Haruhi and Asahina). Really hard to describe.
In general it’s baffling to me how fake English dubs sound, especially because there clearly are a lot of talented English voice actors doing the voices for cartoons etc.
I have the privilege of comparing the English Dubs to the German ones for a lot of shows, and it’s really interesting how, while the German VAs sound distinctly different from the Japanese originals, they sound natural and not overacted, while the English counterparts almost always sound like they were told “make it sound as fake as possible”.
English dubbed anime is routinely one of the worse sub options. Commonly hear that German and Spanish dubs are always good quality by comparison.
Iv always chocked it up to anime is still not treated with any fucking respect in America.
Dunno if this will be helpful or not, but I’ve seen this game getting rave reviews, and apparently it can really help you learn Japanese:
I went to Japan for my honeymoon and so did the obligatory ‘learn the basics’ that I try to do before any trip to a new country.
Getting to a polite level so you can order food, find a train station and so on is relatively easy - probably a week’s effort if you really go for it.
Getting to a conversational level is a whole extra jump from there, however. Definitely a bigger leap than the equivalent in Spanish, for example. Based on this, I’d think that getting to a level where you can follow native speakers doing the exaggerated anime over-acting dialogue would be a hell of a slog and a very commendable achievement.
As everyone else is saying, the written language is very hard to learn, especially if you’re new to non-Latin alphabets. Japanese has three of the damned things and they mix and match seemingly at random (to the eye of the uneducated).
My opinion: if you have an interest and an excuse, go for it! Learning more is never the wrong answer.
A perspective from an European here with nativeness and alike in several latin-related languages and long lasting interest in Japanese language and related culture since the 2000s.
Certainly for written Japanese it will help you your Chinese knowledge (after a learning curve of false-friend associations), I heard that many technical/modern words have been imported in Chinese also from Japanese adaptations (only the characters implied, not the sounds, as is common in indoeuropean language imports), as a return kind voyage, since Japanese writing was first imported from old Chinese and then evolved in today’s system (kanjis and two silabaries). Also many English words have been imported into Japanese, but highly phonetically distorted in the adaptation. Foreign words are easy to spot in written text, and I often chuckle when I understand the word by realising about the original one after backtracing the intended pronunciation.
As a consequence of Chinese influence in the writing system, most of the kanjis have two pronunciations, one(or-more-alike) of Japanese origin and another(or-more-alike) of Chinese origin, which in many cases will resemble to current Chinese ones, but I have heard that phonetic changes will throw away potential direct understanding (also rules about which pronunciation is used when in Japanese are not rock solid or straightforward always) specially since grammar is notably different also. I found that proficiency in two similar related languages (e.g. between roman-latin languages, between germanic languages, etc) develop certain ability in spontaneous word recognition across phonetic variations, but I found this in indoerupean languages with “long” words with “long” roots (not one “syllable” per “word”), not sure how much would work between Mandarin and Cantones and a phonetic adaptation from old Chinese into Japanese, which would be just a part of it.
I am far from fluent in Japanese, but the most basic interactions, grammar recognition, etc and the learned nuances add a wonderful experience to OVS watching (love for those sub volunteers that explain the cultural context of many situations), and since most of my consume is Japanese culturaly rooted (e.g. not sci-fi, western fantasy, etc) I am not interested in dubbed material at all. I think fluency requires a serious investment, even for Chinese background, user abilities and environment may vary this a lot also, so the gain must be worth it: for careless plain consumption of works not rooted in Japanese culture I doubt is worth it, for the rest I find worth the effort to read subs most of the time and appreciate recognise the nuances hard/impossible to translate.
I had zero regrets of all what I invested in Japanese understanding up today, even if is not enough for general understanding, but I also find such cultural travel worthy on each step. I am attempting something alike with Chinese nowadays, let’s see how far I arrive…
Good luck!
TL;DW: keep listening to Japanese media. Watch anime in Japanese with no subs, listen to Japanese podcasts, listen to audiobooks in Japanese, etc. Try to find something you know a bit about because it will help keep you engaged and help with context.
There’s a chapter about tolerating ambiguity which means they in the beginning you won’t understand anything and it will be very frustrating but you need to accept it and keep feeding your brain Japanese inputs. You’ll learn the sentence structure and vocabulary as well as learning pronunciation, this is basically how babies learn. You’re brain is really good at pattern recognition so just give it enough inputs and eventually it will start to click
Start doing Anki cards which will supplement all the inputs. Don’t go overboard, just learn the alphabets and then some common vocab and keep listening to other media. After about a year, start reading and writing a lot. Read manga, read books, and start writing notes and stuff in Japanese.
That’s basically it. You can use study materials if you want but feeding your brain more inputs is key. In addition to being really effective it has the benefit of being way more fun than studying grammar and whatnot
It depends on your age and determination. The younger you are the less effort it will take
Japanese is considered to be the most alien of languages to native English speakers, and vice versa. That said, it has been done, and it doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to learn Japanese as a native English speaker. What it takes is time and dedication.
I actually know a few dozen words in Japanese, but I don’t know Japanese.
As for dubs, I prefer some anime dubbed in Japanese and some anime dubbed in English. Generally English is more accessible in that I don’t have to read as well as listen, but there are some animes I don’t want to be distracted by subtitles.
Anyway, it’s a common misconception in anime that “the language I don’t understand has better voice acting.” It’s because you don’t understand it. If you understood it, you’d likely come to the conclusion that some actors are just better than others, in either dub. The difference is, English dubs pay more and they have a wider pool of talent. But as you learn Japanese, you’ll find the same is true in Japanese dubbing, some of the actors are actually good, and others are just phoning it in, same as anywhere.
I do feel like if you’re familiar with Chinese languages, you probably know that Japanese evolved from Chinese (I’m not sure on the specifics here), like how they have the same numbers. So it’s a good starting point. You can probably read the symbols, or at least know what they sound like. I can read romaji passably enough. But the symbols? Haha nope.
I don’t know shit about Cantonese and the only mandarin I know is the most basic of phrases and stuff to refer to food (so essentially nothing) so I can’t speak to that
Japanese is hard, but so is any language. You get out what you put in. I wasted about a year with “studying” half assed for like 10-15 minutes a day with duolingo. It was good that I had a consistent routine but at the end of 1 year I had very little to show for my effort. Learn from my mistake.
After that I switched things up. I didn’t put in a ton more time but I changed approach. Pretty standard but boring stuff: Anki, Assimil, and some other more targeted apps later on (renshuu, Benkyō, and most recently kanji dojo have been helpful). Setting up language exchange calls via apps like hello talk and discord have been far more helpful as things have progressed. This is more of a significant time investment and requires me to teach English a bit but I am happy to do it for free Japanese instruction. Joining group chats on line, watching YouTubers and vtubers, anime and dramas, etc also is helpful but the hard part was determining when to make the jump to not use subtitles and finding content that was digestible at my level. I’m not the kind of weeb that watches precure and little kid shows but for a minute I did just to watch stuff without subs. It sucked.
After about 5 years I got decent enough to have solid conversations via phone and text. Then DeepL came out and made it all pointless haha
Chozo@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Consuming media is a great way to supplement your language-learning, but be careful not to confuse the dialog used in anime with actual conversational Japanese. Just like how nobody actually talks like a Western cartoon character does, Japanese people don't talk like anime characters. Anime dialog is largely dramatized.
Also for what it's worth; depending on what you're watching, the English dubs have gotten way better in recent years. There's a lot of good talent in the dub scene these days, and Japanese directors are getting better at trusting the performance of western voice actors, instead of demanding that the actor sounds the way they think it should sound in English. In my experience, most dubs post-2010 are generally pretty good. Generally.
Muaddib@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Every time someone says the dub is actually good this time and I try it out, it sounds like shit. Frieren was the last time I trusted the dubbers and they made her sound like a MILF. She’s supposed to sound like a young woman because that’s what she is by elf standards. There was a whole running gag about whether she’s a MILF which doesn’t make any sense in english because she is definitively a MILF there.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Dragonball super has pretty great dubs. So does cowboy bebop. NGE also is pretty good. FMA Brotherhood also does a great job. So is My Hero Academia.