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Originally Posted by haku
Japanese is in my opinion a very hard language, it's an isolate language (which means it's not related to any other languages) and its internal logic is very different from what we know in Indo-European languages.
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Some theories link it to an extended family with Turkic-Altaic family of languages. I've also read somewhere Korean and Japanese have similar grammar but completely different vocabulary, so it almost seems like some proto-koreans came to the Japanese islands a long time ago, maintained the old grammar rules while replacing the vocab with that of Japanese indigenous people. (which makes sense since Koreans and Japanese have much similarities genetically as well)
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Originally Posted by haku
Oh and there's no way English is the 3rd most difficult language in the world.  English is very easy, and it's by far the most simple language of the Indo-European familly, and that familly has dozens of languages which are all much more difficult than English. |
I agree it's pretty easy to learn the basics, but a tough nut to crack if you want to master it properly. Completely opposite to German which as complicated grammar, but once you get past that it's pretty easy to catch it's nuances and get more intimate with it. Imo at least.
For example: I've had english in school for 5 years (not to mention I knew some basics before as well) and when I went to the States there were still some subtle socio-lingual nuances which were uncomprehendable to me, until someone explained them to me. English is a very expressive and flexible language, which is one of it's strenghts but also one of it's downfalls, since this contributes to a prolongued learning process. I firmly believe that someone who learned english as a second or third language will never ever master it as well as a random native speaker.