Introduction:

The Japanese language is an East Asian language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, and its relation to other languages, such as Korean, is debated. Japonic languages have been grouped with other language families such as Ainu, Austroasiatic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance.

Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, a phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is a topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions.

Grammar is an essential element of any language learning course. The same holds good for the Japanese. Yes, learning a completely new language that shares very little or no common grammar rules with English might be a little time-consuming task that takes effort but is completely achievable with grit and determination.

• What makes Japanese grammar hard for foreigners?

When comparing other languages which are similar to English, Learning Japanese might seem to be very difficult to foreigners or non-native speakers because it has different grammar rules, and learning and understanding the characters of kanji might seem to be an uphill task.

• Is Japanese Grammar Hard?

No, Japanese grammar is easy. Many foreign people consider Japanese to be a hard language, but those who’ve studied the grammar know that its grammar may be the easiest part. When you do make the commitment, you’ll realize just how easy it really is, and you’ll be that much more relieved. Foreigners find Japanese grammar difficult because of some of the differences in grammar. English grammar and Japanese grammar have some differences. I would like to point out some differences between these two languages’ grammar.

• Difference in Characters

The most obvious difference between English grammar and Japanese grammar is probably the characters. In English, or Italian, or French, .etc…, all of these languages follow Latin characters from A to Z. However, Japanese grammar does not have Latin characters, it has its own 3 types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. While the Latin script has 26 characters, the Hiragana and Katakana scripts each have 46 and 45 characters. We also have to learn thousands of Kanji characters in which each character/word holds a different meaning. So yes, in terms of characters. Japanese is hard for English or any Romance language native speakers.

• The difference in Verb Tense:

Unlike English grammar which has tons of verb tenses, ranging from past tense to the future tense and each tense has 4 forms: simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive; Japanese grammar only has 2 verb tenses: past and present tense and each tense has formal and informal form. Verbs in Japanese has “masu” ending. In present tense, the positive form will be “masu”, the negative form will be “masen”; and in the past tense, the positive form changes to “mashita” and the negative form changes to “masen deshita”. On the other hand, the formal and informal aspects are quite easy to get.

With so many basic differences foreigners may find Japanese grammar very difficult to learn. However, that need not be the case. Start with some basic steps that can help you learn grammar and in turn learn Japanese better.

• Read grammar books

Start with reading simple grammar books and read it many times and most importantly read regularly. 

• Practice with native speakers

Listening to how native speakers talk can be of great help in understanding grammar from a conversational point of view. 

• Join a language learning class

Joining an online class will help you to learn grammar. You can join Multibhashi for language learning. 

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Keep learning!!!