Is Japanese a difficult language to learn ?

Contrary to the common myth or belief that Japanese is a very difficult language to learn, the two kanas are very easy to learn. However the Kanji characters could little challenging to learn. Japanese characters can be compared to strokes and is unlike roman alphabets. A person can start reading Japanese text if he has mastered the Hiragana and Katakana characters.  Also the other good news is that the words are pronounced the same way as they are spelled and as result you do not have to remember the spellings of each and every word. This is possible because of the use of fewer consonants and simpler pronunciation system of Japanese language as compared to some of the European languages.

The nouns in many European languages likeFrench, Spanish and German have gender i.e., “Masculine”, “Feminine” and “Neuter”. Like English these languageshave tons of irregular verbs and these verbs should agree with the nouns they are used with in number and gender. In contrast Japanese has only 2 irregular verbs and all the remaining verbs do not have a gender, there is no necessity for subject-verb agreement and subjects and object if it is out of context can be omitted.

When it comes to Kanji, though the characters look complex to learn as compared to other two kanas, it is actually a very convenient script as it helps express complicated expressions in a very short way, as each Kanji has a unique meaning associated with it. The current usage of Japanese is very interesting as it is a mixture of Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana with the use of Romaji and Furigana while writing to make it user friendly especially for people new to Japanese language. This also makes it easy to use with latest applications on computer and smart phones.