The Written Languages of Japan

Someone's wish written on a wooden tablet and put up at a shrine

The Foreign Service Institute published a list of easy, moderate and difficult languages to learn as a second language, assuming English is your native language.

Among the easy languages are: Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegian.

Moderate languages include: Russian, Hebrew and Spanish.



The institute lists only four languages in their difficult category. They are:

Arabic, Chinese, Korean.

Oh, and Japanese.




Japanese is actually fairly easy to speak because it lacks many, many sounds that can be found in English. For example, the "th" sound in "that" or the "wo" sound in "woman."
 They also blended together the "l" and "r" sound into one sound, making it nearly impossible for a native Japanese speaker to tell the difference between "right" and "light."



The grammar of Japanese is a little tricky, however, because the word order is a little bit off compared to English.

For example, in English we say, "I threw the ball." In Japanese it would be, "[I] ball threw."

I put the subject of "I" in brackets because a lot of times when you speak in Japanese, you don't need to put a subject in your sentence. Much to the delight of non-native Japanese speakers, the subject of a sentence is often implied without being actually said.



But all of this is not what makes Japanese one of the most difficult languages to master, I think.

That difficulty comes from the fact that the Japanese can, at any time, choose to write in one of three writing systems.



Three.



We English speakers have exactly one writing system, and that is the alphabet. For the record, the Japanese also learn the alphabet, just in case three writing systems wasn't challenging enough for them to master.


In first grade in Japan, children first learn the writing system of hiragana. Hiragana is a phonetic writing system, which means that when you see あ, for example, you know to say "a" (as in "apology")



In second grade, children learn the second writing system, which is katakana. Katakana is phonetic like hiragana, but it is often used for words that aren't native to Japan. 

So for words like "escalator", rather than make up their own new word for it, the Japanese just associated katakana to that English word to get エスカレーター. When you pronounce this quickly enough, you can get "esukureta," which is as close to "escalator" as you can get in Japanese.




The last, and the greatest challenge, is Chinese characters, which Japan calls kanji. Japanese people start to learn kanji in first grade right alongside learning hiragana, and they never stop learning kanji. If I remember correctly, the average Japanese person must know around 20,000 kanji in order to read a newspaper.

A sign all in kanji at a shrine

Kanji are not phonetic; they are symbolic. Think hieroglyphics.

The kanji for "rain", for example, is 雨.

I, for one, look at this kanji and see a window with rain falling outside of it. It makes some sort of sense for me. But the Japanese know to look at this word and know that it's the symbol for rain.

Now comes the question of how to say it, which is an absolute joy to figure out for all non-native Japanese speakers.


The Japanese assigned hiragana to each kanji. So when you look at 雨, the hiragana for it is, あめ.

If you look above in this entry, you'll see that あ means I say "a."
め means that I say "may."
Therefore, the Japanese for "rain" is "amay." That is what you say aloud when you see the symbol for rain.



The problem is that many, many, many kanji don't just have one way of saying it.

How to say a kanji can entirely depend on where it is placed amid a group of kanji, or it can depend on what other kanji it's paired with in order to make up new words.


For example, with 雨, if you shove the kanji for "umbrella" after it, you get　雨傘. This then changes how you say "rain." It becomes, for some lovely reason, "amah."




Perhaps my favorite kanji is 明. You may never know how to say this kanji correctly because there are four different ways to say it just when it's by itself. When it's combined with other kanji, God help you.



Don't even get me started on how to write kanji.