What Is The Hardest Part Of Learning Japanese?

Learning Japanese is hard …but what is the hardest past? …well that’s hard to say.

Every ones experience is going to be different and you will actually probably find a number of different aspects difficult.

I will go through the different areas that you are going to come across and explain what makes them difficult, then it is down to you start learning and find out for yourself which ones you personally find hard.

Don’t Worry About How Hard It Is

The reality is that you are going to find lots of aspects of Japanese hard, especially at the start. Some of you might even think everything is hard …and that is pretty normal. 

However, it doesn’t matter, even if it is hard you will still need to study it, you can’t just skip areas of the language. You have to face your weakness and overcome these areas you find difficult.

As you progress you will get naturally stronger in some areas and you will notice that you have weaker areas and usually these will be the ones you find the hardest and you can then choose to put more time into these.

Listening In Japanese Is Hard

One of the first areas you will focus on when learning Japanese is going to be listening. This sounds like it should be easy …but it’s hard.

You have no real experience with the language and everything is going to sound like a blur and not even like a real language for a while.

Japanese can also seem quite fast and it can often he hard to hear the different words, and even when you do hear them, the fact that sentences are structured in a different order will also throw you off.

However, listening does get easier with time and it will be one of the areas you can master first with enough effort.

Reading In Japanese Is Hard

Reading Japanese is one of those things we all know is going to be hard right away. Just looking at any form of writing is terrifying for a beginner.

Honestly though, it’s not hard, it’s more that you are at complete zero and you need to build form there. You will not know a single letter and you need to take you time to build up this knowledge.

The last time you did something like this was when you learned your ABCs and you are now at the point where you can recognise any letter  …probably back to front or upside down.

You can get to this level in Japanese, it will just take time and effort and building up this ability is hard.    

Kanji Is Very Difficult

If we are going to talk about reading, we need to talk about kanji, which is the final boss of reading.

Mastering hiragana and katakana isn’t too hard, you can sort of get to grips with it and stumble your way through reading words like a little child …but kanji really is the next level and this is not helped by so many of them looking kind of similar, or just really complex.

There is a lot of to learn here, at least 2000 different characters and this is tough and will require some real effort, but it’s not impossible. I think it depends how you go about learning the kanji, but regardless, it’s still a very hard aspect of the language.   

Speaking Is Very Hard

I think another area we are all going to find hard is speaking, however, when we actually do this will make a difference.

If you are just starting out, trying to say anything in Japanese is going to be difficult. We have no experience with the language and our internal understanding of how things should sound is not very clear, making it very hard for us to produce the right sounds.

We can reduce this by doing a lot of immersion first, meaning we get a good understanding through listening. It will still be hard to speak, but our internal framework of how things should sound are going to be stronger and we will be able to train our tongues to make the right sounds a lot easier. It will still take work, but it will make a difference.  

Writing In Japanese Is A Real Challenge

Personally I would say the hardest part of Japanese is writing, but this is also the area I have put the least effort.

Hand writing is hard, this is like everything else I have mentioned, where you have no experience and are starting at zero, sure you can write in English, but this is form years of moving your hands in the shape of the English letters …they are not used to moving in the shape of Japanese letters, let alone your brain will struggle to recall what the letters actually look like.

I would say I have a good recognition skill when it comes to the letters, but recalling these from memory …I am going to struggle, let alone the fact I lack the hand coordination to draw the shapes.

Of course kanji is the same problem, but probably harder again due to the complexity of things.

The reality is that you can skip hand writing, most of us don’t need it, so we can luckily avoid it.

Typing In Japanese

Typing in Japanese is going to be much more likely and is easier than handwriting, but it’s still hard. Really the difficultly is around remembering the word and recognising the kanji.

It is very easy to misspell a word and type the wrong thing …and then end up with a totally different word on your screen. If you take the English word “heard” for example, imagine you remembered this slightly wrong and you ended up tying “beard” you might think it looks right …but your sentence is now utter nonsense.

This something you are going to face a lot when typing in Japanese, but you will get better with time.   

You Will Find Japanese Grammar Hard

When anyone mentions the word “grammar” most people feel a slight panic …and this is because we all know grammar is hard and Japanese grammar is no exception.

There are plenty of aspects of Japanese grammar which are going to trip you up and take a while to get to grips with, such the sentence order and particles and even concepts like the zero ga are going to seem really difficult at first.

You will also find the casual and polite versions of the language are just unnecessarily harder than they need to.

Grammar is grammar, it’s tough but necessary and you will find it just kind of falls into place eventually.

Remembering Japanese Vocabulary Is Hard

You can’t learn a language without learning vocabulary, but that doesn’t make things easy.

Japanese vocabulary is hard and this is something I personally struggle with and I think this is a twofold issue.

Firstly the words are made up form Japanese letters or kanji, which I’ve already touched on above. This just makes reading or recognising the words difficult.

Then you have the second issue that the words sound very well… different. These are Japanese words, so they sound nothing like their English meaning. It’s not like French or Spanish where you almost get the meanings of the word as they are similar.

This makes the whole process of remembering the words more difficult and I find I have to put more effort into this. The good thing is that once I have the words inside my brain, they usually stick there pretty well, it’s just the initial task of getting them in there that is hard.

Is Finding Japanese Resources Hard To Find?

A lot of language learning is going to revolve around being able to find material to immerse with or resources to study with.

Luckily, for Japanese, this isn’t an issue. Out of all the languages you can learn, Japanese is up near the top, if not the top for resources. (Maybe English has more resources, but we can speak English already)  

There really is nothing hard about finding resources in Japanese, if anything the problem is being overwhelmed with the choice and not being sure where to start.

Finding Opportunities To Use Japanese Can Be Hard

While resources are easily found, actually finding a reason to use the language is harder.

Unless you live in Japan, you probably do not need Japanese. It is not really spoken outside of Japan, so the chances of you actually needing Japanese are pretty low if you live elsewhere.

This isn’t really a problem, you can always find uses for it …but you are going to have to go and find them.

You are actively going to have to seek out material to watch or read and find people to speak to. You can’t just sit there and expect the Japanese speakers to come to you, and even if they do …they will want to speak English, so you will need to make the effort to use Japanese, which can be hard.

Staying Consistent With Japanese Is Hard

Probably one of the hardest parts of Japanese is just staying consistent with it.

You really are going to have to put a lot of time and effort into learning this language and if you want results, you need to stay consistent, arguably having to study daily. Staying consistent and actually doing the work is vital. If you are sporadic, you will just not get anywhere.

Conclusion

So hopefully you can see now that really any area of Japanese can be hard and you may find many of these a struggle.

The only thing you can do is start learning and see what happens. Expect to find some parts harder than others, but so long as you keep studying, you can overcome this.

Don’t let the fact that “it’s hard” stop you …its hard, not impossible, so put the work in!  

(If you are looking to learn Japanese, you can follow my plan – Learn Japanese – The Plan For A Complete Beginner)