Difficulty of Japanese and Mandarin as spoken languages

[leosmith]

would the FSI difficulty rankings look different when considering languages only in their spoken forms?

I consider the 7 pillars of language learning to be listening, reading, conversing, writing, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Does reading and writing a difficult script make the other pillars more difficult? Absolutely. So if you eliminate reading and writing, or use the same script for all languages, would the overall difficulty (time to learn) rankings change? Sure.

But of course, that's never going to happen. So what we have is another "Who has the hardest grammar?" thread. It's funny, because grammar is not the hardest pillar to acquire. Listening and vocabulary take much longer.

[golyplot]

I’ve heard Japanese grammar is rather tough, though I’ve never studied it myself.

It's not. Word order is no more challenging than German. Tenses are pretty easy and there aren't many of them. Verbs are very regular. No genders, articles, declensions or plural forms to worry about. Particles are no more challenging than prepositions in other languages.

The hardest parts of learning Japanese are the vocabulary and the writing system.

I would imagine if it wasn't for the writing system, Japanese would be of a similar difficulty to something like Finnish.

Sorry, but this is just wrong. Even just going by word order, English and German are practically the same language compared to Japanese. Japanese grammar is harder for an English speaker and there's just no comparison.

English: This is the air conditioner I bought at the department store last week
German: This is the air conditioner that I last week at the department store bought have
Japanese: This last week department store at bought air conditioner is

Even the simplest sentences show different word orders:

English: What is this?
German: What is this?
Japanese: This what (is)?

And that's just the easy cases where we use the same words. In Japanese, they'll often phrase things in a completely different way from English in the first place, in addition to having a different word order.

[gsbod]

Japanese grammar is harder for an English speaker and there's just no comparison.

I didn't realise my comments would be so controversial.

I still believe if you can handle relative clauses and extended clauses being used as adjectives in German, you're capable of handling Japanese word order.

Also if you're just looking at basic sentences with main clause only, you need less information to create a grammatically correct Japanese sentence. No noun genders, articles, multiple irregular verbs or plural forms to worry about. Just word order and particles.

Maybe my judgement is skewed by the fact I learned Japanese before German, and was then charmed by some unexpected similarities in German grammar. I love how in German you can start a main clause with the topic and don't have to start with the subject, for example.

Anyway, to be clear, I would never claim Japanese as a whole to be as easy as German. It's not. But at least from my perspective, the problem is not in the grammar. YMMV I guess.

[Querneus]

But of course, that's never going to happen. So what we have is another "Who has the hardest grammar?" thread. It's funny, because grammar is not the hardest pillar to acquire. Listening and vocabulary take much longer.

That very much matches my experience, and it's something I already like to mention a lot. And Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese having the scripts they have, vocabulary learning does turn more difficult than it would otherwise already be in a "shallow", wholly pronunciation-based script.

I do wonder why Korean is ranked at the top next to them though. I don't really buy the "Korean grammar is like Japanese grammar except worse at every corner" argument expressed sometimes... Something makes me suspect that FSI's Korean program might likely involve making students learn some hanja for Sino-Korean vocabulary, if it isn't simply because it's "grouped" with the rest of East Asian languages (somehow not including Vietnamese, probaly due to the Latin script). Arabic is easier to justify for obvious reasons (the crazy diglossia).

[golyplot]

Also if you're just looking at basic sentences with main clause only, you need less information to create a grammatically correct Japanese sentence. No noun genders, articles, multiple irregular verbs or plural forms to worry about. Just word order and particles.

Your original claim was about word order, which those have nothing to do with. Gender is just "requires a lot of annoying vocab memorization", so it's more analogous to having to memorize readings and kanji with Japanese vocab, except that there are only three possible values, it only applies to nouns, and it is only needed for production, not reception (barring rare trick questions where subject and object order are swapped and indicated by the endings, but Japanese does that all the time anyway).

[gsbod]

Your original claim was about word order, which those have nothing to do with. Gender is just "requires a lot of annoying vocab memorization", so it's more analogous to having to memorize readings and kanji with Japanese vocab, except that there are only three possible values, it only applies to nouns, and it is only needed for production, not reception (barring rare trick questions where subject and object order are swapped and indicated by the endings, but Japanese does that all the time anyway).

My original claim started with word order and moved on to other areas of the grammar. All in the same paragraph.

If other people find Japanese grammar particularly hard, who am I to argue. We all have different experiences and difficulties, it keeps things interesting.

Personally, I found Japanese grammar no harder than German. But actually, I love German more, including the grammar.

(Also slightly disappointed nobody has mentioned transitive/intransitive verbs in Japanese - IMHO that's one of the trickier bits).

Honestly I only muscled in because of tastyonions original post which was not based on his own experience...and to be clear, I do respect his contributions here in general, he's achieved a lot with the languages he has studied.

[leosmith]

I do wonder why Korean is ranked at the top next to them though. I don't really buy the "Korean grammar is like Japanese grammar except worse at every corner" argument expressed sometimes...

I agree with you - it doesn't belong there imo. It's a tough language, but not nearly as tough as Chinese or Japanese due to Chinese characters.

[lichtrausch]

I do wonder why Korean is ranked at the top next to them though. I don't really buy the "Korean grammar is like Japanese grammar except worse at every corner" argument expressed sometimes... Something makes me suspect that FSI's Korean program might likely involve making students learn some hanja for Sino-Korean vocabulary, if it isn't simply because it's "grouped" with the rest of East Asian languages (somehow not including Vietnamese, probaly due to the Latin script).

There are dozens of learners of Korean on this forum. Have any of them reached C2 in the language? If not, it could be a sign that Korean belongs in that highest ranking.

[Dragon27]

There's also Arabic at the top there with those East Asian languages. I highly doubt that the Arabic script idiosyncracies (lack of vowels, for instance) make it in any way comparable in difficulty to logograms. So why should Korean be considered of a lower category just because it decided to distance itself from the Chinese characters?

I don't know about languages like Vietnamese though. Maybe they should be moved up a notch too.

[jimmy]

I sometimes think that these two languages were not comparable.(Chinese & Japanese)
Chinese (I left learning this) because I do not know how to implement or carry out the tonality.
I have too much limited information about japanese. but for myself ,I can surely say that ; that is not a reason to have difficulty drawing chinese characters. Although traditional Chinese is a bit more complex in this regard, that last explanation is valid even for traditional Chinese.

conversely, drawing chinese characters was really pleasure for me. But I left as said ,I doubt I would be able to carry out the correct form of each tone I learn.