"To show just how complex this can get, let’s take a simple English phrase – “I love you” – and dissect the many ways in which it can be said in Japanese. Spoiler alert: it’s not such a simple phrase in Japanese. One of our course contributors, Sho, estimated and found that there can actually be as many as 248,026 ways to say “I love you” in Japanese!"

These kind statistics are a kind of lie in themselves. You can say something like "omae wo aishiteimasu", but that's no more a normal way to say "I love you" than "I'm bonkers for that shithead". That has nothing to do with the grammar, it's lexical. "omae wo aishiteimasu" has a different meaning from "anata ga suki da yo".

I've been told by a friend of mine that speaks Japanese that the most difficult aspect is that how you speak changes due the social setting. It's not just the syntax, you must learn how to speak in each different situation.

Here is Richard Feynman talking about the same problem:

While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour. One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?" I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned. "No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden? you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite." "Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use. Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens..." I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see." "No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?" Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.

I learned hiragana and katakana using the "Kanji Study" app by Chase Colburn. On the google app store.

I don't know the guy, but the app is simply amazing. Repetion, through fun methods, I learned hiragana as I rode the Tokyo metro and katakana too. (It also helped that everywhere was both Kanas)

Since we're all talking about how we all picked up some Japanese, I thought I'd throw it out there. I normally never donate to apps, but this is one app that is amazingly well polished, has a beautiful UI and the UX makes me guility that I don't sit down and do it daily.

Hell, thanks to it, I can transliterate japanese songs into kana and with the Kanji learning moudles I had fun translating last names into english and saying them. Nothing helped me more in making friends at random mixers or networking events then seeing someones Japanese name, properly addressing them and embarrassing myself by talking horrible Japanese.

But, Reading it, it's amazing. The manga too, I can read all the manga now if it has nice usage of furigana. Hentai manga, does not, though.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwiste...

Really, I don't know the guy, the app is great and, without it my time in Japan would've been greatly not as quality. I made friends, thanks to this app, that I know I will know forever.

I shameless self-plug: As a successful Japanese learner (and since then, a Japanese teacher and recently a software engineer in a Japanese company), I was interviewed recently about learning Japanese: https://www.koipun.com/blog/learning-japanese-by-listening-a...

Why should you possibly be interested: because not only did I learn Japanese and taught it, I also did a fair part of reading about the research on language acquisition and neurolinguistics as a part of my master's studies, so I know what I'm talking about.

I started learning Japanese around 8 years ago, and I've never been a fan of saying it's "the most difficult language to learn." It's like learning anything else, if you enjoy learning it and are motivated enough, you'll get better. Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes."

If you're learning Japanese in school, or even if you're learning it on your own, I recommend the Genki I and Genki II books, and the corresponding workbooks. If you really enjoy it and want to come to Japan to use your newly acquired language skills, I'm confident that after getting through those 2 books you'll have enough Japanese to get by and you can have fun wandering around, reading signs, chatting with strangers, etc. Don't be discouraged by people saying that Japanese is so difficult to learn.

Edit: also, I hope this comment didn't come off as too negative. I think it's great that Duolingo is doing this, and if it gets more people to enjoy learning Japanese then that's fantastic.

One thing that I notice is missing from most (all?) online language courses is wider context. Not cultural context, but basic grammatical context. Most of them on focus on learning words or sentences.

This is fine for similar languages. When you learn French you can learn that 'the' equals 'le' and 'la' and apply some extra rules to smooth over the differences.

It totally falls down on languages that have less in common. Almost all Japanese natives who speak English struggle with 'the' and 'a'. (this isn't a criticism, just a fact of life). I wonder if part of the problem is that most people learn languages on the sentence level. Read the following sentences:

The man went to the store.

A man went to the store.

Which one is correct? Well, there's certainly nothing grammatically wrong with either, but depending on the situation one or the other could be very misleading, confusing and unnatural. Most people, at least in Japan, learn from textbooks showing examples like this. It tells you absolutely nothing about 'the' and 'a'! So they end up reading huge explanations in their native language and come away thinking 'Wow, foreign languages are hard'.

I took Japanese in college, and the worst thing wasn't the writing system, vocabulary or grammar. They were hard mind you, but far from impossible, nothing flash cards couldn't fix.

What was (and is) very hard for me is how (in general) the bulk of Japanese communication happens in what is unsaid. Even trying to work through patio11's Stockfighter course, I found it very hard to 'read between the lines' in what he was saying to find out what I was supposed to do. I also have zero low-level programming experience, so that probably didn't help.

I hope Duolingo mentions this and has training for "what do they really mean", as trusting what they say at face value seems like a good way to cause an incident. This may also be useful in understanding American Southerners or cop dramas, where direct communication is strictly verboten.

One thing about learning languages that works for me. Don't look at them as a bunch of rules to memorise. The article is talking about thousands of ways of saying "I love you" to indicate how complicated Japanese is. In reality, this complexity is somewhat artificial because you are considering way too many rules and variations, the vast majority of these combinations are almost never actually used. To use an crude analogy HN might be comfortable with, a Japanese language compiler could optimise away most of the language.

I'm glad the course seems designed around this consideration. It's goal-oriented: talk about everyday human things, clothes, weather, food, family. It's never been helpful for me to memorise vocabulary lists without a context to say them in. Instead, putting myself into situations where certain things must be said or understood greatly improved my competence.

After a while, your language instinct kicks in and you start to generate your own internal rules for the language, which will approximate or match the rules that native speakers have internalised.

I suppose this is can all summarised as, well duh, of course immersion works, but I wanted to say it anyway.

I've been learning japanese (and living in japan) for the past few months, and tried out duolingos new course when they released it yesterday. I've used quite a few different apps and books, and I must say I was pretty unimpressed. Their lessons give very little info on what you're learning, and with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning. I will experiment with it a bit more, but I've already done the first 6 or 7 lessons (chapters?) and am not impressed.

If you want to see an incredibly well built japanese learning tool, look at Human Japanese http://www.humanjapanese.com/ - i am in no way affiliated, just a happy student

The guys at Language Log have a (series of) very interesting posts about how to learn Japanese and Chinese. The comments are a gold-mine as well

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10554

I'm not criticizing Duolingo, but I'm wondering if language apps are like gym memberships -- people sign up enthusiastically but after the first month, 90% don't or can't continue.

Learning a new language as an adult is an incredibly difficult undertaking; much more so than persevering with the gym. The dropout rate must be huge.

Where is the Japanese course on Duolingo ? I can't find it in their language list : https://en.duolingo.com/register ?

From a pragmatic point of view Chinese would be much more useful, but there are a tons of good resources for that already, so dunno. Congratulations anyway. I've used Duolingo to refresh my German some time back.

I don't know of a more useful app than Duolingo till date and This is just another feather in the cap.

The only thing i don't understand about it is how it makes money? Yes, i read somewhere that they use it to translate news sites and documents but I've been playing it for almost 300 days now (uninterrupted streak) and still my French proficiency is nowhere near to make a worthwhile translation like any professional. This one really boggles my mind because it looks like they have a huge team and invest a lot of time and resources and so must have a lot of expenses.

I started a project to be able to conjugate as many languages as I could and I'd love to accept Japanese if anybody is up for the challenge: https://github.com/llipio/conjugator

So far, I've managed to understand enough korean, spanish, and french grammar to review merge requests. Its interesting reading stories of how HN community picked up Japanese, some of the suggestions are pretty helpful.

I studied basic Japanese at school. I've been waiting for this to refresh my skills. I didn't think the speaking and listening part of learning the language was that hard.

Hiragana and Katakana are pretty simple and straight-forward. As for Kanji, I haven't studied the Kanji to deeply, but to me it comes down to pattern recognition and memorization.

My wife is Thai, and I've been trying to learn the language on and off for a few years now. For me it's the complete opposite of Japanese difficulty-wise. The reading and writing part is straight forward once you learn the alphabet and the special rules. The part I have trouble with most is the speaking part since there are multiple pitches and using them correctly is important. For instance "khao khao" is white rice, "now" can mean either means either cold or disgusting. Luckily, if you don't speak or hear the pitch correctly, most of the time you can get by using context.

As the they say in the article, Japanese is classified among the most difficult languages for English speakers by Foreign Service Institute and this is widely cited as a fact. But interestingly, no research data on this was ever published. (The institute presented the facts as based on their internal research, but no methods, results or anything was ever published. Nowadays the original page has disappeared from the internet.)

Bill VanPatten, a linguist that specialises on second/foreign language acquisition lamented this on his podcast, Tea With BVP. According to him, there isn't any published research that shows that one language as a whole would be more difficult as another one for speakers of some other language. (He is not speaking about writing systems but about spoken language there – Japanese has obviously very complicated writing system.)

I've been learning some simple Korean, and the biggest stumbling block is romanization. 한글 is so simple to learn that there is no reason to romanize it. To make matters worse, Korean vowels are very specific, and quite different from English vowels. My instinct is to find Korean children's books, and learn to read like a Korean. Either way, romanization is harmful.

Japanese does not have the same problem per se. Romanization of Japanese is quite effective. All you need to understand are a="ah", e="eh", u="ooh", o="oh" and i="eeh". That being said, it is still very important to learn kana; else, what would you read?

Huh, I've just started learning Japanese after spending several weeks there and looking forward to visiting many more times, and I would never characterize it as especially difficult. There are some challenges, but nothing mind-blowing.

The kana and kanji may seem intimidating, but identifying fragments and context through repetition has been more rewarding and entertaining than frustrating.

I understand there are many subtleties, but after having hung around some native speakers for a while and hearing the patterns and starting to pick up on pronunciation, rhythmic patterns and key words, conversation topics start to become intelligible and communication possible.

When I was learning to read and write Japanese, I used the iOS app "Learn Japanese with Tako" by Grogshot games. They use gamification to make it fun. Very cute, check it out! (I'm not affiliated with them)

To improve your vocabulary while on the go (hands free) I heartily recommand the "Nemo" apps by Nemo Apps (e.g. "Nemo japanese"). They're available for both iOS and Android and for many languages. You can usually train the first 200 words for free.

I am still waiting for Mandarin, IIRC it was announced a few years go but still not available last time I checked. If they release Japanese now there might some glimmer of hope.

I made a Windows application for drilling oneself in kanji meanings and readings.

http://www.kylheku.com/tankan/

It is browser-based. It runs a tiny webserver, controlled by an icon in the system notification area.

If you go through the license workflow, you get full use of the program for a limited period. Put in "hackernews" into the promo code field and I might provide a generous extension.

I enjoyed the series produced by public television called "Irasshai". The lessons are available on the Georgia Public Broadcasting site and texts can be purchased from Amazon. For those who have fond memories of "French In Action", this will give you a similar vibe even though it isn't quite the same thing.

http://www.gpb.org/irasshai

Shameless plug: I made a small webapp to memorize Japanese vocabulary through spaced repetition and a Tinder-like interface: https://core.cards/

I made it for myself, but someone else might find it useful. It is the alternative of carrying a huge stack of cards as I used to do. Requires Github login though to syncronize through devices.

Check out Michele Thomas or Paul Noble Audio language learning - absolutely no reading or workbook required.

Regarding the Feynman quote:

1. It is told in a sensationalist way that either is or is close to being orientalism. I believe Feynman was known for his story-telling skills (sometimes with some hyperbole for effect), and I think this case is no different.

2. That said, for someone doing a crash course in Japanese, I can see how this can come across as being confusing... but it's not terribly complicated for a smart person like Feynman. Maybe the teacher wasn't particularly skilled...

3. That said, if Japanese is learned in context over some period of time, using the wrong verb form in these contexts just intuitively sounds wrong to the point that it makes me (and others) reflexively wince.

4. That said, the deeper levels of keigo (not the minor stuff mentioned by Feynman) can actually be challenging to learn, even for Japanese people. This is mainly because the content is unfamiliar since the contexts are not experienced regularly (or ever)... until they are, then the keigo becomes natural.

5. That said, someone like Feynman (and in fact most westerners) would get a pass for using any form of "see" if it is in Japanese. Most Japanese I know have low expectations (rightly or wrongly) for foreigners speaking Japanese, so using the wrong verb form typically doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

This is a very salient point on the difficulty and nature of Japanese.

Japanese language is very tightly integrated with Japanese society, to the extent that I would cheekily argue it doesn't even count as speaking Japanese outside of the context of a Japanese social setting or structure.

To elaborate on your point regarding the proliferation of vocabulary from honorific synonyms, consider how much of the grammatical gamut is wrapped up in identifying the speaker's relationship with the listener. Who is the in-group? Who is the out-group? Is the speaker a man or woman? What is the relative social position of the speaker and listener? Is the utterance written or spoken?

Japanese is a language that identifies the answers to all of these questions with explicit grammar markers, while omitting number, case, conjugation, and employs only two tenses (realis and irrealis).

Learning Japanese in a classroom outside of Japan, or heaven forfend, through individual study alone, is an awkward and disconnected experience, since there is scarce opportunity to practice the major components of Japanese grammar in a real way.

Also kanji.

I'm going to disagree with your friend. The hardest part of Japanese is reading it. You can train all that social stuff through usage and watching a lot of TV. But reading? It's a nightmare.

The simple elementary school stuff isn't hard. But the highschool and college-level stuff? Ugh. Thousands of characters with multiple pronunciations each, sometimes with very tiny differences between them.

I only took a couple courses in japanese, but I'm pretty sure that this quote vastly overstates the difficulty of politeness levels for verbs.

Each verb has different forms for formal/informal/very formal, but they're highly regular. For example "iku" is "go" and "ikimasu" is "go (polite)". "wakaru" is "understand" and "wakarimasu" is "understand (polite)". It's not like you have to learn four forms of each verb, you learn the basic one and then you know the rest. The ultra-formal versions, which are more rarely used, are also regular - they involve the infinitive of the verb plus a conjugated auxiliary verb IIRC, like saying "presume to go", "presume to understand" etc.

If you need audio I would also recommend: http://www.pimsleuraudio.com/pimsleur_search_result.php?lang...

I've been using it in a similar manner on the train. 30 minutes per day and I'm holding my own ordering food, having basic conversation,.. (I live in tokyo)

I learned hiragana and katakana simply by writing each character over several pages, and also writing out the 10x5 tables numerous times. It was a week or two out of my life.

That app is one of the best I found, but it's sadly based on data that is flawed at fundamental levels IMHO. The even more sad part is that it's actually hard to find good data. In fact, the data that I would like to exist doesn't exist, or is so hard to find that I haven't found it. But there's probably some matter of taste in there, so I won't bother you with that, but I'll list my gripes with the data a lot (if not most) apps use.

- Jim Breen's JMDICT/EDICT. While very valuable, its "word priority marking" data is based on word frequency from old newspapers. That makes it both outdated and biased (newspapers don't use the same range of vocabulary as conversational japanese or books or other forms of expression)

- Jim Breen's KANJIDIC: It contains all sorts of readings for characters, some of which don't even appear in many japanese dictionaries, without any kind of differentiation whether they're rare or not. I also recently found that the Kang Xi radicals it contains don't all match the Kang Xi radicals contained in the Unihan database from the Unicode consortium (I reported the discrepancy to M. Breen).

- KanjiVG: Used in many apps, including Kanji Study, to show stroke order, and document radicals/kanji parts. Sadly, that last part is full of fantasy. To give a couple examples:

- The parts it gives for 息 are 自, 目, 心. Yeah, 目. Because, you know, if you remove the small stroke at the top of 自, you can see 目, but that's highly irrelevant. Furthermore, the only meaning listed for 自 is "one's self" except in characters like 息, 臭, 嗅, 鼻 it's "nose".

- The parts it gives for 専 are 寸 and a vertical stroke. Sure, there's barely a character for the top part of that character (many fonts don't have it, but it exists: http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/u24c14), but a vertical stroke? really?

Consequently, when looking at characters associated with a radical in Kanji Study, you end up with lists larger than they ought to be if you look at simple radicals like 目, because everything that contains 自 or 首 is listed as well.

Maybe that helps beginners in some ways, I don't know, but feeding them with useless information doesn't sound very useful on the long run.

Now, another problem I have with all these resources (and others you can find on the web) is that the most comprehensive data tends to be in English. Which is great for native English speakers, but really, studying a language in yet another language that is not native to you is not the greatest experience.

Finally, past a certain level of japanese (from my experience), it's better to use japanese-japanese resources. Because things don't map 1:1 between languages, and past a certain point, you get a sense of how some japanese words differ from what you would normally find in dictionaries to your native language. And it's then better to have other words defined in terms of those you already know than in terms of yet other not-quite-matching native words. Sadly, I haven't found good online (or in-app) japanese-japanese resources, except for Kanjipedia.

OTOH, I realized a while ago that I'm completely useless at translating japanese into my own native language. I'd take a japanese sentence I understand fully and be completely stuck trying to convey its meaning in my native language. This may or may not be related to the fact that my japanese abilities grew mostly through japanese than through non-japanese resources. Either way, translation is definitely a skill that is acquired separately.

Looks like you went to the same hiragana/katakana school I did!

Anything similar on iOS you'd mind to recommend?

From what you say in that article about the importance of listening to language used in context, you might be interested in a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response). I've written about it before here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13910080

It's been super effective for me at learning vocabulary and grammar (in context), and I much prefer that method over things like flashcards, Anki, supermemmo, etc.

Fascinating read, thanks for sharing!

It is worth saying it's an extremely difficult language to learn because most people are not prepared for what awaits them even if they learned another language before. Anyone can pick up how to read kana in a week or so, so it's easy to assume that you're almost there, and you'll be reading manga or whatever in no time. But it's just the beginning. The language is completely different. You must commit a huge amount of time every day and change the way you think. One must be mentally prepared to give up a chunk of their free time for the foreseeable future (years!), because it won't be easy.

Also IME, you barely need to speak any Japanese to wander around Japan and read the signs (because they're all in English anyway). Definitely recommended regardless of language proficiency.

> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes."

That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go where.

Of course, articulating yourself correctly is the bigger (or more long-term) challenge when learning a second language, but in the case of Japanese you have a higher up-front learning curve than with most other languages.

You are correct that it's like learning anything else. If you put the time in and are motivated and go about it the right way you can learn it.

But it's still "the most difficult language to learn". So it's worth taking that difficulty into account. For example one can learn Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in around the same amount of time it would take to learn Japanese.

We used Genki I back in high school, and recently I picked it up again. Now I'm through Genki II and can definitely recommend them. They were both updated a few years ago with more contemporary examples and really useful culture notes for each section. Working through the listening comprehension exercises was particularly fulfilling.

The one downside is that they are still meant to be used in a classroom, so there are a lot of exercises that expect you to work in groups or pairs. Of course there are plenty of ways to find a study group online these days.

I second this and add Satori Reader (by the makers of Human Japanese, I think) for learning to read and grammar by example. I would also strongly recommend WaniKani for anyone learning kanji.

There's no substitute for immersion and classroom time, though.

I've been using Human Japanese fairly consistently for the last 6 months or so. I have a few chapters left so can't speak to the Kanji sections but I've really enjoyed the app as a whole. I found hiragana/katakana to be a little rough because the sets of characters were spread out so I recommend a flashcard app for the characters instead. But the context and style of presentation the app has makes it so easy to understand what you are actually trying to accomplish. Big fan.

> with things like kanji it only teaches you the sound and not the meaning

Damn, that's precisely the opposite of how you should learn them.

My Japanese ability pretty much exploded after I set aside two months to study the kanji divorced from their readings with James Heisig's method. Totally worth it. The readings come with time.

I found that to ask to answer to a question to a word that you never saw in your life, and just try to figure it randomily is not an efficient way. I tried Duolingo way to teach Japanese and found it very frustrating ...

ex : what is the word for "read" ? and then to have to choose between 4 words written in hiragana or translate "ろく” having 6 choices ...

Thanks. I recently purchased the Human Japanese app, and I took a 2 year subscription on japanesepod101.com. I wasn't sure whether duolingos would have been a better choice. Probably not. But I'm still happy to have read your message. I'll stick to the two tools I've paid for.

I've been living, working, studying, playing in Japan for the last 8 years. I came here with no knowledge of the language (except "ohayou" because of that Sesame Street where Big Bird goes to Japan). Learning katakana and hiragana took an afternoon of riding the train and reading signs. The first 3 years I didn't really study much, but talking to old men in bars and spending time in the hospital boosted my communication level a ton. By year 6 I had business level spoken Japanese but had never been able to get into kanji, so I was basically illiterate, but stilled managed to get hired by a Japanese company (with no use for my English skills). I've been using WaniKani for the last half year and it has massively improved my kanji level. It's definitely aimed towards native (american) English speakers, but if you want to learn Kanji, I can highly recommend it. It's actually the only online service (other than Netflix) that I've ever paid for ($50/year with a coupon). Most of the other free apps I've used have been like gym memberships, but for some reason this one sticks.

I tried Duolingo for French and Russian, and dropped both after a week.

Part of it is that I have nothing invested in either language and was just curious, but I also think Duolingo itself is a bit flawed; it repeats way too much material and makes you jump through too many hoops. I was busy and it was a hassle.

I think if you're going to study a language, a textbook + Anki is the way to go. If you tell Anki you know something, the algorithm believes you and shows it to you less often so you have more time to focus on what matters. It doesn't make you translate "the black cat" five times in one sitting.

I suspect it depends on why you're learning. As you say learning languages is hard, especially as an adult.

I couldn't imagine learning a language for "fun", but I know others do. I can easily imagine a lot of them dropping-out and giving up, once they've either learned enough to be useful or decided it is not for them.

But me? I've moved from Scotland to Finland. I'm very slowly learning the language. I don't expect I'll ever be fluent, but I need to try. People who move abroad, and avoid learning the language are not so well respected, and rightly so.

Thus far I've managed to have medical treatment, buy a flat, and do lots of complex things in English, but it would still be better for me to learn Finnish. If only so people don't need to switch languages, solely for my benefit, at parties, etc. (That's appreciated, but also a constant reminder of how much I suck!)

I certainly dropped out of learning spanish with duolingo a couple of years ago (after maybe a few months). All that is left is how to order a beer, but with such a horrible german accent that at least one native speaker burst out into laughter when I attempted... Anyway, I went into it with a "let's see this works" attitude and looking back I'm surprised how far I even got. Low barriers to entry mean low barriers to exit. I guess without loss-aversion, say from investing in a private tutor, or some other form of skin in the game (distant relatives at the place, intense affection for the culture of the place, actually living there) it's hard to keep the motivation up. But I guess duolingo works for the later group.

I'm sure lots of people drop out, but I stuck with Dutch for 400 days in a row - only 10 to 20 minutes a day. I'm not fluent, but I have a basic vocabulary. Duolingo does a very good job helping you learn. Now I'm working on trying to fix up my high school French, but will be switching to the Japanese.

The usefulness of a language depends if you are going to use. I got your point, China is HUGE and extremely important at the moment and future.

But at the same time japanese can be seen as very useful because:

- its a very important ally of the USA;

- introduce you to the ideographic writing system;

- be very similar to korean grammar (and particle system).

I still wish Duolingo would make a course on Chinese :(

Currently my favorite app is "Decipher Chinese". I read one story a day, save words I want to remember and get quizzed on them periodically.