LingoCards – Top trilingual language learning app

Japanese has a reputation for being hard to learn. It’s true that learning the writing system is challenging, but it’s just one of the many aspects of Japanese. Actually, Japanese is surprisingly simple and it can be much easier than other languages.

Here are 5 reasons why Japanese is easy to learn.

1. Simple pronunciation

Japanese has 45 basic syllables. Does it sound a lot compare to 26 letters in English? That fact is that while one letter can be pronounced in a variety of ways in English, each Japanese syllable can be pronounced only one way. Therefore, once you learn the alphabet, you’ll be able to pronounce Hiragana and Katakana words correctly wherever you see it.

Furthermore, Japanese is not a tonal language. Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, etc., you do not need to learn a specific tone for each and every syllable.

2. Nouns doesn’t change the form.

There is no concept of noun genders in Japanese. If you study Romance languages like Spanish, French, you need to always think whether the noun is “masculine”, “feminine” or “neuter”, but it is not the case for Japanese.

Besides, singular and plural nouns are the same form in Japanese. So basically nouns doesn’t change the form in any cases.

3. No conjugations

One of the hardest part to learn Romance languages is to memorise tons of conjugations. However, to learn Japanese verbs, you don’t need to memorize nor think these complicated conjugations.

4. Plenty of English loanwords

Do you think that you need to memorize all Japanese vocabulary newly as Japanese is totally different language from English? In fact, there are lots of English loanwords in Japanese. Although Japanese people pronounce them in different way, it’s much easier to pick up these vocabulary than totally unknown vocabulary.

Moreover, when you don’t the how to say in Japanese, try to say in English! Sometimes it works!

5. You can leave out subjects & objects

Japanese is a quite logical language. When the subject or object is clear, you can just leave them out. For example, if someone ask you “Did you watch this movie?”, you can simply answer “Watched.” as the subject (I) and object (the movie) are obvious. You don’t even need to replace the object to pronoun.

 

Now, do you think learning Japanese is much easier than you think? Of course, learning any language has difficulty and memorizing Kanji is not that easy. However,  it’s good to keep in mind that Japanese language itself is not that difficult to learn.

Lastly, try our app LingoCards to make your learning easier!