View Single Post
Old 19-07-2006, 01:20   #103
haku haku is offline
iMod
 
haku's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Normandie
Age: 54
Gender: Male
Posts: 7,839

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.

For example, in Indo-European languages, to express a basic action, you use a personal pronoun and a verb, the personal pronoun indicates who does the action, the verb indicates what the action is (some Indo-European languages rarely use personal pronouns because the verbs have different endings for each person, which is enough to convey who does the action).

Well, Japanese doesn't have personal pronouns, it has words that can be used like personal pronouns in some specific cases, but most of the time, a typical Japanese sentence has no personal pronouns, and don't expect the verbal ending to indicate who does the action, Japanese verbs don't agree in person, number or gender… Which doesn't mean that Japanese verbs are invariable, oh no, they agree in politeness, that's right, Japanese verbs are conjugated according to 3 main levels of politeness (but there are more).

This simple example is to show that Japanese grammar rely on totally different concepts, on an entirely different logic, the language is totally alien for Indo-Euopean speakers (or speakers of any other language group for that matter) and require a huge mental effort to adapt to the Japanese logic.

And of course i didn't even mention the writing system which is actually a combination of no less than three writing systems, one ideographic (kanji) and two syllabic (hiragana, katakana).

The Wikipedia page on Japanese grammar gives a good idea of what to expect.


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.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Patrick | TatySite.net t.E.A.m. [ shortdickman@free.fr ]

Last edited by haku; 19-07-2006 at 01:34.
  Reply With Quote