{"id":42,"date":"2014-06-16T13:40:17","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T13:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/www\/?p=42"},"modified":"2019-09-05T10:01:34","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T10:01:34","slug":"reasons-learning-japanese-easier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lingo-apps.com\/zh-hant\/reasons-learning-japanese-easier\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Reasons Why Learning Japanese Is Easier Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"origami<\/a>
\n<\/a>1. The writing isn\u2019t as difficult as you\u2019ve been told<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with one of the most common complaints about Japanese: the\u00a0three different sets of characters used to write it. The first of these, the characters imported from China called\u00a0kanji<\/i>, are a legitimate obstacle on the way to becoming proficient, as there are about 2,000 that are commonly used.<\/p>\n

Learning 2,000 characters is no joke, but it\u2019s still a far smaller amount than the number you\u2019d need to become functional in Chinese. Several Japanese kanji are simplified versions, compared to their originals forms, to boot.<\/p>\n

While remembering kanji can be an uphill struggle at first,\u00a0learners eventually reach a critical mass of knowledge, at which point they gain the ability to discern the meaning of words they\u2019ve never seen before. For example, if you know \u7740 means to put on, \u8272 means color, and \u6599 means cooking, you can probably guess that \u7740\u8272\u6599 means food coloring, even if you\u2019re not sure how to pronounce it (it\u2019s\u00a0chakushokuryo<\/i>, by the way).<\/p>\n

The other two sets of phonetic written characters are even less of a problem.\u00a0Hiragana, the set used for writing Japanese words, consists of 46 characters. That may seem like an intimidating number at first, but no individual symbol is particularly complex, and\u00a0almost all are simple enough to write with two or three strokes of your pen. Learn two a day, and you\u2019ll be completely able to read and write the set in less than a month.<\/p>\n

This is honestly about as hard as hiragana ever gets.<\/i><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a second set of phonetics, called\u00a0katakana, which gets used for writing foreign loanwords in Japanese, and it\u2019s also got 46 characters. But before you burn your Japanese textbooks and sign up for French class, take a look at how\u00a0remarkably similar the hiragana (left) and katakana (right) for certain sounds can be:<\/p>\n

ri: \u308a \/ \u30ea
\nka: \u304b \/ \u30ab
\nse: \u305b \/ \u30bb
\nki: \u304d \/ \u30ad<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve learned hiragana, katakana comes pretty quickly. Best of all,\u00a0the pronunciation rules for hiragana and katakana don\u2019t have nearly the same amount of wiggle room as English\u00a0with its long and short vowels and hard and soft consonants. If you see \u304b written in a thousand different words, for example, it\u2019ll be pronounced \u201cka\u201d in each and every one.<\/p>\n

2. Pronunciation is a snap<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sharp-minded linguists have probably already figured this out, but that point about absolute rules of pronunciation is related to another nice thing about learning Japanese. Having 46 phonetic characters with only one possible pronunciation means there are\u00a0only 46 possible sounds in the language. While that might seem like a lot, it\u2019s actually a comparatively\u00a0small set of sounds to train yourself to pronounce and hear. This is especially true if you\u2019re comparing Japanese to English, where the myriad possible readings for the 26 letters of the alphabet and their near-limitless combinations make things a lot more complex.<\/p>\n

Also, Japanese\u00a0isn\u2019t a tonal language. That doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s spoken by droning flatly like Frankenstein\u2019s monster, but rather that\u00a0changing your pitch or stress as you say a word doesn\u2019t result in it taking on different meanings\u00a0like some kind of linguistic shape shifter.<\/p>\n

For example, take a look at anything written in Spanish, and notice\u00a0all the accent marks which the language requires. Or try speaking Vietnamese, which has so many tones that even linguists can\u2019t agree if the correct number is six or eight.<\/p>\n

If pronunciation in your language is so precise it\u2019s\u00a0measured in\u00a0milliseconds, it\u2019s harder than in Japanese.<\/i><\/p>\n

3. Simplified time<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a nation that values precision and punctuality, Japan\u2019s language is surprisingly laid back with regards to time.\u00a0Japanese doesn\u2019t have a future tense, so \u201cI cook,\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m going to cook\u201d are said exactly the same way.<\/p>\n

While that might seem incredibly confusing,\u00a0context usually makes which the speaker means incredibly clear.<\/p>\n

Also, not having a future tense means\u00a0at least one less grammar rule to memorize. Even English, which seems so straightforward in this regard, has two oftentimes exclusive ways of expressing future actions (if you don\u2019t believe us, next time the doorbell rings, try telling your family \u201cI\u2019m going to get it!\u201d instead of \u201cI\u2019ll\u201d).<\/p>\n

Japanese does have a past tense, but there are clear rules for it, as opposed to the largely arbitrary way things are done in English (\u201ccall\u201d becomes \u201ccalled\u201d but \u201cfall\u201d becomes \u201cfell?\u201d). And students of Japanese have it way easier than would-be speakers of Finnish, which has different verb forms for the distant past, ordinary past, recent past, near future, regular future, and far future.<\/p>\n

4. Mountains and mountains of source material<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some textbooks make a big deal out of the use of\u00a0different words used in Japanese depending on the age\/social standing of the speaker and listener, even though this is something that exists in other cultures as well.<\/p>\n

Still, Japanese does have a few more conventions regarding this than other languages, which is largely a reflection of social norms. There is, though, another way in which Japanese society makes its language far easier to learn than many others.<\/p>\n

5. Japan produces a ton of consumer media.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While you wouldn\u2019t mistake a lot of it for Shakespeare in terms of complexity or timelessness, the Japanese creative industry is a veritable juggernaut in the amount of\u00a0TV shows, movies, books, magazines, music, animation, comics, and video games\u00a0it pumps out.\u00a0Young people are the target market\u00a0for the vast majority of it, and while that may not always result in the most mature storytelling, it does ensure that\u00a0the language is largely contemporary and close to the way people are speaking in Japan right now. Walk into any Japanese bookstore, plunk down a few bucks, and you can come away with hundreds of pages of 100 percent authentic study material.<\/p>\n

Does learning Japanese take effort? Sure, just like damn near anything in life worth doing. But as all the members of our team can personally attest to, it\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0possible, and it might just be easier than you think.<\/p>\n

reference: RocketNews24<\/a><\/p>\n

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