How Long Does it Take an Average Person to Learn Japanese?
How Long Does it Take an Average Person to Learn Japanese?
By Chun Tak Nicholas Tsoi
Overview:
There is no exact answer as to how fast an average person acquires enough skills in the Japanese language to converse/write fluently. Like all the languages of the world,it will depend on your age, your desire to learn, time you spend learning, and other factors. If you just take a class and don’t actually put in the time to do some self-studying, it’s going to be a long while. One of the best ways to learn is definitely go to Japan and surround yourself with Japanese people.
Challenging Aspects of the Japanese Language:
Definitely, the most difficult aspect of Japanese to most people is Kanji or Chinese Characters. But I think anyone can do it if they have the motivation to spend the time memorizing and understanding the structure of Kanji. The Japanese typically uses around 2,000 Kanji in their common everyday life (either newspaper/media) anything beyond the prescribed list of 2000 is more if you are pursuing any technical fields like medical, legal , business terms. Grammar can post a challenge to some due to the SOV sentence pattern unlike the SVO pattern of Chinese or English. If you are a Korean learner of Japanese, then you will have the SOV pattern to your advantage. In terms of pronunciation, Japanese phonetic is fairly straight forward made up of 5 main vowel and additional consonant sounds in combination. To most speakers of English, this should not post much of a problem.
Number of Years you should expect to master Japanese:
On average if you want to become fluent, it will take some time, usually if you attend university and take a 4 year Japanese class; it should be sufficient to get you fairly fluent. If you want to just become conversationally fluent, it is highly possible to achieve fluency within 1-2 years if you live in Japan or regularly surround yourself with Japanese people. Becoming ‘fluent’ has more to do with the quality of instruction and study rather than any specific time period. The more quality practice you have with native speakers, the less time you’ll have to spend to get to the level you desire. You could take college classes for 4 years and barely be able to order food at a restaurant, or for one day you could role play the situation with a native speaker and have it down pat. It’s all about the focus and your determination!
Conclusion:
Japanese is not intrinsically difficult; it’s just very different from English, having evolved on a completely separate linguistic path. If you happen to know Korean, you will learn Japanese just about as easily as an English speaker learns German. Otherwise, it will take you longer than it would to learn a Romance language such as Spanish or French. How much longer? I’ve heard the Foreign Service ranks it along with Chinese in the “most difficult” category, just above Russian – more specifically, learning Japanese supposedly takes you 3 to 4 times the amount of time it would take you to learn the “easiest” languages (French, Spanish).
If you want to find out more about the Japanese Language and what it takes to master it please visit at http://japaneselanguagecenter.blogspot.com/ Thank you!!
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