The Language Teacher
06 - 2001
Is Japanese a Hard Language?
Graham Healey
The market says it is. Average starting salaries of graduates in Japanese are higher than those of graduates in most other subjects. Rates of pay for translation from and into Japanese are higher than those for almost any other language. And all the foreign and diplomatic services that I know anything about pay their staff larger allowances for acquiring Japanese language skills than for other languages (except such languages as Chinese, Korean and Arabic). High prices cause supply to rise to meet demand. If knowing Japanese is so well rewarded, the number of people who learn it to a high enough standard to use it professionally should rise to the point where prices start to fall. If this number remains relatively low, and prices relatively high, that's presumably because learning Japanese to this level is not an easy thing to do. QED.
But in what sense is it hard?
The pronunciation isn't. Any English speaker who doesn't actually have a tin ear can learn to pronounce Japanese comprehensibly in an hour or so. In the dear dead days beyond recall before e-mail and faxes, I received a telephone call from my local post office to say that I'd had a telegram from Japan. They were supposed to read it to me over the phone before delivering the hard copy (a phrase nobody would have understood at the time), but it was in romanised Japanese. "Have a go," I said, and understood perfectly well what the official, who had no idea what it meant, read out to me.
And the grammar (in the usual sense of morphology and syntax) is both relatively simple and astonishingly regular. In my bolder moments, I sometimes undertake to argue that Japanese is simpler than Esperanto. Zamenhof saw language in European terms, and what he invented was a new European indeed, a new Romance language. He reduced the number of definite and indefinite articles from two or three to one, but failed to realise that you can do without them altogether. He made inflection for the plural in nouns perfectly regular, not realising that there's no need for noun inflection at all. When it comes to verb inflection I have to concede that Japanese has more classes of verbs than is strictly necessary, but compared with any other language I know anything about (except Chinese and its cousins, and maybe depending on how you look at it English) it's impressively frugal in this regard as well. It's possible to lay out a complete account of the inflection of verbs and adjectives in Japanese (with every anomaly accounted for) in font size 12 on one side of a sheet of A4 and you can't say that about many other languages.
So what makes it a hard language?
The answer, of course, is the writing system, the most complex in use in the modern world. To be literate in modern Japanese you need to know nearly 100 kana letters and about 2,500 Chinese characters (the kanji prescribed for teaching in schools plus several hundred others in common use). Waiting for a train on Tokyo Station a couple of weeks ago, I occupied my time by counting the number of different kanji you have to know in order to read the names of the stations on various lines. You need over 200 just to get round the Yamanote Line. To learn this number of kanji (and all the various readings they may have in Japanese in this respect Chinese and Korean are easier) in adulthood requires a huge investment of time and effort. It's like learning to become a concert pianist or a professional soccer player. Learning to play well enough for a family sing-song, or reach the standard where you get picked for an amateur team in a Sunday league is enjoyable, life-enhancing and altogether a good thing, but to play at Carnegie Hall or be bought by Manchester United is something else, and requires dedication. These two professions also require talent. Learning to read Japanese doesn't -- or not in the same sense. It demands a certain dedication, which presupposes a certain love of the activity for its own sake, and that's a sort of talent, but it doesn't require any great intellectual gifts. If very few foreigners do learn to read Japanese well, it's for lack of motive or opportunity, not means.
I haven't, of course, asked the obvious question -- hard for whom? It may be hard for foreign learners, but is it hard for the Japanese? Well, in the developed world, which in principle demands that everybody be literate, any writing system that defeated a high proportion of the members of the language community would pretty soon be abandoned or modified. (The Japanese, Chinese and Korean writing systems were all modified in the middle of the last century, for that reason.) Many English-speaking countries anguish over their levels of functional illiteracy, but Japan doesn't seem to have that much of a problem. (No room, I'm afraid, to discuss what's meant by 'literacy', whether the level of literacy in Japan is really as high as claimed, whether or not there is such a thing as dyslexia in Japan, and so on. Let's just say that nearly every Japanese person manages to learn to read.) How do they manage to gain a command of such an immensely complex system when many native-speakers of English find it difficult to cope with a system that only requires them to learn 26 letters? I think the answer, very briefly, is that, while English uses a small number of phonetic signs and a set of spelling rules so complex as to appear to some to be random, the kana sets use a somewhat larger number of phonetic signs with a very simple and perfectly reliable set of three or four spelling rules. The consequence is that by the age of seven or eight -- often much earlier -- all Japanese children have at their command a writing system that enables them to set down accurately anything at all that they hear. You could, in principle, dictate the Equal Employment Opportunities Law (not an easy read) to a group of nine-year-olds and have them take it down perfectly accurately (as long as you told them when wa or o was a particle), even though they would understand next to none of it. From that point, learning the kanji, and substituting them as appropriate for kana, is only a feat of memory. And since the Japanese education system requires students to learn about 2,000 kanji over nine years (four or five a week) it's not really that much of a feat. Foreign learners, if they're not to lose heart altogether, need to learn at a much faster rate, and the pressure tells. If you don't feel that you're starting to get to grips with the written language in a reasonable time, the temptation just to give up is strong.
I said that learning kanji didn't require any particular talent. Is that true? Well, since about 50 per cent of the 126 or so million Japanese must have average or lower-than-average abilities, even if we assume for the sake of argument that the average level of ability of the Japanese is somewhat higher than that of say, native-speakers of English, it must still be true that 80 or 90 per cent of English-speakers have the intellectual equipment to learn to read Japanese. The message is: it can be done, but it demands determination, and, like training for a marathon, it needs to be a regular daily regime. And don't be discouraged by the fact that the kanji you've learned don't all stay in your head. That's the way it is for native-speakers of Japanese, too. I've been studying Chinese and Japanese for forty years. Assuming (reasonably enough) that over that period I've tried to learn on average four or five new kanji a week, some 8,000 or 10,000 kanji have passed through my head. How many are in there at the moment, I've really no idea. This week I've been working on a translation of a 19th century book which includes long and highly poetic (in the Chinese style) descriptions of the mountain scenery of Switzerland. Just at the moment I could probably write out from memory thirty or forty characters peak, pinnacle, slope, cliff, crag, lofty, soaring, dizzying, looming, towering, and so on. But in six months most of them will have retreated to the 'read only' part of my brain, and some of them will have gone altogether.
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