I am regularly asked by Japanese people if Japanese is the most difficult language to learn. They are disappointed if I do not agree that it is. But every language has its own unique difficulties, and with enough exposure all difficulties can be overcome. There is no unlearnable language. Certainly the legions of young English language teachers who come to Japan to teach English are proof that Japanese presents no major problems for the person who wants to integrate with Japanese society. Many of these foreigners become good Japanese speakers. Young Japanese people are generally open and sociable and I often think these foreign teachers benefit more from their stay in Japan than their students who are trying to learn English.
A major obstacle to learning Japanese is the problem of the Chinese characters, or Kanji as they are called in Japanese. Many language learners can learn to speak well without reading, but it is easier to gain a feeling for the language if you can read it as you listen. Reading is a form of sensual appreciation of the language quite different from listening, and it strengthens your understanding of the language. Having learned most of the characters I needed from Chinese, I had an advantage. However, the pronunciation in Japanese can be a problem. Unlike Chinese, there are often several ways to pronounce the same characters. The meaning of Chinese characters in Japanese can sometimes be different from the meaning in Chinese.
I had to design my own learning program based on my interests and abilities. This is easily done in today's digital age but was very difficult to do when I lived in Tokyo. Knowing the Kanji characters, at least in Chinese, I concentrated on Japanese content that was weighted towards Chinese characters, such as the newspapers and the radio news, and then progressed to more day-to-day conversation. I was able to conduct business in Japanese fairly soon, but did not understand television soap operas until later.
Living in a Japanese environment and reading the Japanese newspapers daily trained my mind to read characters. I observed that my ability to read Chinese improved while I was in Japan although I essentially never read Chinese. I think that my ability to speak Chinese also improved because my brain was becoming even more capable of processing different languages. Certainly learning new languages has never crowded out previously learned languages or confused me.
The relationship between writing systems and the brain is interesting and illustrates the many sided nature of language learning. According to Robert Ornstein in The Right Mind: Almost all pictographic systems [of writing] favor a vertical layout, while most phonographic systems are horizontal. And out of several hundred phonographic systems that have vowels, almost all are written toward the right, while of over fifty languages that do not have any signs for vowels, all are written to the left. This strongly suggests that there is a good reason for the connection between type of system and direction. And the most likely candidate is that our eyes and brain work in different ways depending on what sorts of scripts they are reading. It is likely that the culture one encounters at birth and first few years affects the way the hemispheres are organized.
The Greeks, as well as just about everybody else in the world, developed their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet. By mid-700s BC, the new Greek alphabet was in use but being written from right to left in the same way as its parent. Within a hundred and fifty years or so it was written in boustrophedon, referring to the route an ox plows a field-alternately right to left and left to right. But by about 550 BC it had settled down into the familiar left to right.
Aside from the writing system, another early obstacle I found in Japanese was the similarity of the sounds. This is a common reaction when starting a new language, but Japanese has, in fact, fewer different sounds than most languages. Vocabulary acquisition was slow at first. This problem disappeared as I got used to seeing and hearing words in their natural contexts. Difficulties encountered at the early stages in language learning can be discouraging. However consistent exposure and an open mind will gradually allow you to overcome these problems.
