How Easy Is It To Learn Japanese If You Know Chinese

Singapore Japanese Courses, Skillsfuture Japanese Courses Singapore

How hard is it to acquire Japanese? While some people may say it's the nigh difficult linguistic communication they accept tried to learn, some people will tell y'all Japanese is not that difficult to master. Information technology all depends on your groundwork and dedication in learning the language.

Speakers of Asian languages like Chinese and Korean may find Japanese easier to learn due to sure similarities across languages. For instance, Chinese shares some written characters with the Japanese kanji writing system, making it easier for those who know Chinese to learn the meaning of kanji characters.

Even if you have no prior experience in languages that are similar to Japanese, learning the language can seem piece of cake if yous are highly motivated. The bulldoze to chief the language volition assist you lot stay committed and enjoy the learning process.

As some people will tell y'all, some parts of Japanese are easier to learn than others. Let's walk through the different aspects and evaluate how challenging they truly are.

Phonetics

The pronunciation organisation of Japanese is non difficult, yet some key differences can be hard to grasp on the offset try. Essentially, Japanese syllables are very simple – they are either a vowel (east.g. 'a') or a consonant plus vowel (due east.g. 'ya'). Never will yous accept consonant clusters similar the 'str-' sound in 'strength'. By stringing up these simple syllables, yous can easily make up words and sentences.

Ane sound that may trip you up at beginning is the 'R' or 'L' sound. In English, 'R' and 'Fifty' have singled-out sounds, only in Japanese, in that location is merely one sound that is pronounced like an in-between of 'R' and 'Fifty'. In addition, Japanese has a 'half-vowel' sound unremarkably romanised every bit 'u', like in 'gozaimasu'. This 'u' audio should not be a long 'oo' sound, only rather, pronounced like an extra crush of the 's'.

Overall, Japanese pronunciation should not be too tricky to master, relieve for those few exceptions. To pick upward Japanese pronunciation readily, you should expose yourself to the audio of native Japanese spoken language through films, podcasts, or conversations with Japanese speakers. Do goes a long way every bit well to refine your pronunciation, every bit, after all, pronunciation is a matter of musculus retentiveness.

Japanese writing systems

You lot should know by now that Japanese has not one, but three singled-out writing systems. This immediately makes the writing system of Japanese three times harder than that of other languages. However, with some exercise, some of these writing systems are non as hard as y'all think.

Hiragana and Katana are the syllabic writing systems, meaning that each graphic symbol corresponds to a fixed sound. Due to this straightforward mapping, all you lot have to do is memorise the characters and their sounds, much like how you would acquire the alphabet. Learning them in the context of words will assistance you remember them meliorate.

The bigger challenge comes in learning Kanji. These are borrowed characters from Chinese script, and are tricky because their apply varies. For instance, the character for 'mount' can be pronounced in the native Japanese style 'yama' or in the Chinese adopted pronunciation 'san'. While this will have some getting used to, the most disquisitional attribute of Kanji will be to acquire the meanings of these characters and so that you can understand them in reading.

Japanese grammar

Depending on your native linguistic communication, Japanese grammar tin be extremely unproblematic, or extremely disruptive. If your native language shares grammatical similarities with Japanese, it won't exist hard to wrap your head around the word lodge in Japanese. Yet, if you come from an English-speaking background, for case, you will need to practise some reverse engineering.

The most vital departure betwixt English and Japanese grammar is the judgement structure. In Japanese, sentences have a subject-object-verb gild, which means a judgement similar 'I like apples.' will sound like 'I apples like.' In addition, y'all will need to larn how to marker tenses in Japanese using what is called 'verb conjugation', rather than in the English language fashion where nosotros add '-ed' or '-due south' to words.

And that concludes it – does Japanese seem easy or difficult to you? If yous call back you need some help with learning Japanese, non to worry! In Singapore Japanese courses are not difficult to come by. By enrolling in a well-reputed language grade, you can be introduced to these aspects of Japanese in a step-by-stride manner, ensuring you lot will get a good grasp of them in the nearly efficient fashion possible.