Hey, guys. Japanese can seem overwhelming: it has relatively no ties to English, the structure is different, and it uses totally different characters. But if you want to do it, nothing can stop you. You just have to keep a few things in mind!
English speakers commonly learn languages like French, Spanish, and German because a) the languages are widely spoken, and b) the structure is very similar to English and a lot of the words are similar or come from the same roots. We're spoiled by both of these factors. Think about it: the only big structural adjustment we have to make is "put the adjectives after the nouns," and then there are so many words we already know or only have to make small adjustments to (like happy-->felicity-->feliz; green-->verdant-->vert/verde). So yeah, if this has been our expectation when learning a language, then yes: we're gonna feel overwhelmed when we try to attack a language like Japanese. If you're aware if this expectation and can combat it before you get too frustrated with Japanese, then you'll see that Japanese is actually quite simple.
First of all, anything you put your mind to, you can do. For instance, I spent years learning Spanish, and could easily have been fluent by this time, but I never had a strong, personal connection to the language, so I was never motivated to move forward. On the other hand, I've been rapidly improving on my Japanese and will soon surpass my Spanish after just a year of study. Heck yeah, it can definitely be overwhelming working on a language that doesn't even use a Roman alphabet. Even with Danish, you or I could at least pretend we know how to pronounce the words by reading them phonetically. But in Japanese to even sound out the words, without even knowing their meaning, we have to learn, bare minimum, 46 characters and their sounds. But let me tell you that it is so rewarding when you start doing it. When I first started learning hiragana, I took out the first volume of the Sailor Moon manga. I'd look up phrases occasionally, but I was mostly just sounding out the characters for practice. I remember the first time I recognized a word. I sounded out "to-mo-da... tomodachi! Tomodachi! FRIEND!" I was so excited. It is times like these when you can choose to have a self-celebratory (and very un-Japanese) prideful moment where you feel very superior over all those people who never leave their sacred Roman alphabet.
Once you get past these two factors I mentioned (the structure and vocabulary similarities) you might actually start to notice that some of Japanese is really quite easy. For instance, with Spanish, I'm not sure I ever actually got far enough to talk about what I "will" do, and I hardly learned past tense. In Japanese, you can learn this all in one day: masu and mashita. Boom. Done. You can now talk about today, yesterday, and tomorrow. You're welcome. Japanese also has a lot of excellent phrases that I really recommend you listen to instead of try to translate. That's how you know a phrase is great: when you can't translate it easily. Phrases like, "douzo," "yoroshiku," "itadakimasu," and even "sou."
My recommendation is to start learning Japanese with no expectations. If you don't expect shortcuts to be there, you'll save yourself a lot of frustration. And, again, you might just notice that there are quite a lot of shortcuts available to you. Last thought: feel luck that you're learning Japanese from an English perspective because, yes, there are a lot of loan words. Think about someone whose native language is something other than English; those loan words (like "chansu (opportunity)," "shouto hea (short hair)," and even "haato (heart)" will be just that many more words for them to learn. Ganbatte!
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