I love to travel and I like learning new languages. I enjoyed taking five years of French in high school and college and now I am thinking about taking classes in either Japanese or Korean. Does anybody have any first-hand experience with the difficulty of learning an Asian language? I would love to learn, but I am scared off a little by the huge differences between romance languages and asian languages.

 

I'm sure it is a bit more difficult to learn an asian language since it is not latin based such as the one you mentioned. But I'm sure if you want to learn it you will get it how hard will it be depends on the effort.

 

I've started to learn Vietnamese and Japaneese, memorize memorize practice and memorize.

 

I started to learn japanese from a friend of mine. The problem with japanese (I assume other asian languages as well)....first of all, our non-asian tounges arent trained to move that fast, so as a result, the words are extremely mispronouced. Next, grammar. In japanese, two different sentences can be visually identical except one word. It is very confusing to a non-asian. I am still trying to grasp it, but it is EXTREMELY difficult. I already speak 5 languages, and would like to speak Japanese....however, I dont think I will be able to do it. Like Vin said, since its not latin based, its hard to learn for us non asians. Also, here is another question for you asians, is Japanese the "slowest" of the asian languages, compared with mandarin, chinese, etc.?

 

I've always been told that english was the hardest to learn

 

Not even close. English is THE easiest language to learn.

 

Learning an asian language is probably one of the hardest languages to learn. It's very difficult for a non-asian to learn to differentiate the sublte intonations that make up much of the languages. For example, the same word can have four different meanings depending on how you inflect your voice.

You don't want to call your mother a horse.

 

I always heard English is the hardest.
Any language that has "I before E, except after C" is ridiculous. Or how "I read the book yesterday, isn't, I readed the book yesterday".

Anyways, I took French in HS, then took Japanese in college. Japanese is much harder. Memorizing hiragana, katakana isn't too bad (main 'letters' of japanese), but once you try and get into Kanji, it gets out of hand. Too many characters to memorize. Very complex. If you don't practice daily, you will forget. I can't remember any of them anymore. Also I noticed the sentences are somewhat backwards. Its like 'ashita, watashi wa atarashi kuruma o kaimasu!" which translates to "tomorrow, I new car buy!". If its a long sentence you might forget what its all about...

 

English is the hardest language to learn, simply due to the fact that it is a language of exceptions. Everything in english is an exception. Native speakers take it for granted because we grew up with it, so we dont really see it.

I am currently learning mandarin and it is pretty bad in terms of hardness. Chinese is a tonal language, and between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, it is the only tonal language. Id say Korean is the easiest. It has an alphabet, the grammer isnt hard at all. Japanese is second, they have 4 alphabets if you count romanji, the pronounciation isnt too dificult. The grammer is a bit more complex when you get to higher levels and you have to deal with memorizing kanji (Japanese usage of Chinese characters). Mandarin (Beijing Chinese) isnt too bad, lots of memorization though and it is sometimes very hard to understand (esp if you dont know what they are talking about, if you know the basis of the conversation it is easier to follow). Cantonese (HK Chinese) is killer. Id recommend staying far far away from it. Id say learn Japanese if you are looking for something relatively easy, romanji will help you learn alot (romanji is japanese written in English). Dont be worried about having perfect pronounciation. That is something developed with time. Your tongue isnt trained to make the sounds, but sounds that are close, and with time and practice you can learn to make asian sounds. Good luck

 

And it is "I before E, except after C and words that rhyme with neighbor or weigh... or eight... or sleight... you know just forget it"