Taking intro level Japanese course next quarter.

How difficult is it to learn? I feel as if I should have taken this in high school over Spanish, but its too late for that now.

I can already speak English, Punjabi, and Spanish to a certain extent, so I'm not sure if I should be anticipating a major change.

Let me know what you guys think, and please... no spam.

no idea what punjabi is, but its nothing like the others.
if college level, they might go pretty fast so will have to study a lot, hiragana/katakana/kanji etc

Compared to most other language, Japanese sentence structure is SOV (subject-object-verb).
English is SVO (subject-verb-object) which also many other languages are.

It's not too difficult. Though, all the kanji can be overwhelming (you need to learn 2000~ kanjis to be able to read daily newspaper).
Just repeat writing the kanjis on paper until they feel natural and of course write them in words when learning the different readings for them.

頑張って！

I believe Punjabi is SOV as well. Regardless, I can understand the structural differences(I hope).

2000~ kanji... that is a lot, but I REALLY want to learn Japanese, so I think I could put up with it. This has been a desire of mine for a while now.

Thank for the info so far & any more would be appreciated.

I'm also planning on taking Japanese class, good luck to you.

I think the most difficult part of japanese is the grammatical structure. Knowing the word order doesn't really help since Japanese isn't ALWAYS SOV (well the verb is always at the end but since there are classifiers and grammatical markers the order of the object and subject can change). I'll admit i'm not fluent, i've only been studying for 1 1/2 years, but I still feel like i haven't learned anything really yet so I can testify that it isn't a easy language although there never really is one.

The alphabets take also some time to learn, It took me probably 1 year to be comfortable with my katakana, hiragana pace but now I think the main problem is getting into Kanji which isn't as bad as other people have said IF you practice. It just sucks that you have to learn everything in all katakana, hiragana, kanji, and romaji (to type in japanese) which does sound a little intimidating

Motivation is key, but its funny because when I first started Japanese in college my class was packed with Japanese learners now in the 4th level i'm taking the size has diminished probably by 1/2 just keep going and DON'T GIVE UP WHEN IT BECOMES TOO DIFFICULT. Japanese isn't easy or a walk in the park so have the mentality that you will be doing some work.

Good luck though :)

Thanks for the information.

Nice avatar btw... kind of mesmerizing.

Unless you're Finnish (like me), the pronaunciation will be very hard for you. English speaking japanese sounds horrible.


The grammar is the easiest I've seen in any language, but the fact that you have to learn 140kanas + more than 600 kanjis to actually be able to understund any japanese text is pretty depressing.



It's all about motivation. If you study 1 kanji per day, you'll know most of the important kanjis in 2-3 years

I'm studying English/Japanse @ university.
It's a lot of work but if you're really motivated and if you have some easiness to learn languages you'll be just fine