Is Japanese Hard To Learn? (Explained!)

Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn. It is a complex language both grammatically and socially. It can depend on whom you ask, but learning any language is never easy—and when it’s as different from your own as Japanese is from English, it becomes a great deal harder.

While learning Japanese is an immensely rewarding experience and skill to have, there is no two ways about the fact that it’s going to take you a lot of time to truly master.

Of course, you may only wish to get a casual understanding for speaking it, and this can be a lot easier.

In any case, let’s find out more.

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How difficult is Japanese to learn?

To put it simply, Japanese is about as difficult to learn as languages get for an English speaker.

The simplest way to put this into perspective is the language families both languages belong to.

English, along with the vast majority of European languages, are part of the Indo-European language family.

English is also a Germanic language, along with languages like Dutch and Norwegian.

While learning these languages is still hard, it’s made a lot easier by their relative closeness to English.

Japanese, though, is not even on the same continent as English.

It is part of the Japonic language family, and as the name suggests is not even particularly closely related to other languages in Asia.

The point being, English and Japanese are about as different from one another as two languages can be.

This means you are more or less starting from scratch when learning Japanese, whereas with other languages you’ll have a better basis for understanding them.

This means learning Japanese is going to be tough and it’s going to take time.

You shouldn’t get discouraged, though.

With determination and persistence, there is no reason it should be harder for you to learn Japanese than any of the English speakers who have done so before you.

Circumstances can also influence how much trouble you have learning a language.

You will, of course, have to spend a lot of time in classes studying.

But this is only going to be part of the process.

Most will tell you the best way to fully cement your learned language and reach fluency is to live among Japanese speakers and speak the language every day.

If you aren’t able to do this, learning the language is still possible, but it may take longer.

Let’s look at how long it might take.

How long does Japanese take to learn?

The Foreign Service Institute has a category of language difficulty based on how hard a given language is for an English speaker to learn.

There are five categories, with category V being the most difficult, and Japanese is a category V language.

Languages in this category, broadly speaking, will take you around 2200 hours of study to learn.

This is around 88 weeks.

So, in the study alone, it will take you well over a year of constant learning to get to the level that you’re able to comfortably conduct yourself in most situations.

But the process of learning naturally does not stop there.

As mentioned, after your study, you’ve still got a lot to learn, and most people then go on to become fluent and even a native level speaker by living in the country and speaking the language constantly.

Getting to this level, depending on who you ask, could take up to five years.

So, learning Japanese is not something you can do overnight—you’ve got to be prepared for it to take a long time.

Can you become fluent in Japanese in 3 years?

You could certainly become fluent in Japanese in three years under the right set of conditions.

As mentioned, your best bet will be living in the country.

Depending on how you define “fluent”, you might be there well before three years if you are diligent in your studies and don’t mind throwing yourself into situations, speaking the language—and making mistakes!

Within five years, most learners who have fully done this are more or less at native level.

It can of course depend on the person, but again, we all have basically the same capacity to learn languages—it’s just about your attitude and how you approach it.

Is Japanese harder than Korean?

For the most part, Japanese and Korean are of comparable difficulty. For an English speaker, you’re not going to have a massively easier time learning one language or the other.

They’re both very different from English and both Category V languages, meaning around 2200 hours of study.

Socially, many say that the hierarchies of politeness in Japanese culture make mastering the language more difficult because it can be harder to know what to say and when, but from a purely linguistic point of view, there is not a great deal of difference in the difficulty of these two languages.

So, without a doubt, you’ve got a lot of study and struggle on your hands to learn Japanese.

This is true of essentially any language, but with Japanese, it’s about as difficult as you can expect it to get.

At the same time, many want to learn the language but fear that it is essentially impossible for them—this is not the case.

Many before you have learned Japanese, and they have all the same abilities to learn as you do!
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