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The last post looked at three items which I would list as the difficulties facing a would-be learner of Japanese. But they're by no means impossible obstacles. And take heart, o student: I can list a lot more than three things that I find make the language easy to learn!

The easy stuff

Less grammar cruft

For some reason, I think a lot of people expect the opposite here: a bizarrely convoluted grammar would nicely support presuppositions about an "exotic" language. But I'll happily hold up Japanese grammar as the learner's friend; it's missing a lot of the little complexities that add a lot of headache for little benefit. Below are some of the things you don't have to worry about. Grammar haters, rejoice!

No plurals. Dog or dogs? Having plurals in a language is more complex than just adding an "s" to "dog", and isn't terribly useful either – all a topic to expound upon later. For now, be happy that in Japanese you won't have to worry about "dog" or "dogs". The non-specificity sometimes helps what you want to say (think of any situation in English in which you have to clumsily say things like "a person or persons"). And when you do need to specify number, there are simple ways to do so. (Like just saying "one dog". What could be simpler?)

No noun genders. None of that "male/female/neutral noun" nonsense of European languages. (Praise the gods that English missed out on that.)

No "a" or "the". Ah, the indefinite and definite article. They're so basic to English, you wonder how a language can get along without them. Just fine, it turns out; lots of languages, including Japanese, happily do without. (A side note: How many versions of "the" are there in German, all separated by noun gender and number and what-have-you? A half dozen or more? It's zero in Japanese.)

Nice regular verbs. Eat, ate, eaten. Reach, reached, reached. Teach, taught, taught. Hit, hit, hit. Dive, dove... dived? Or was it dove again? Diven? No, I'm thinking of driven...

Yech. Conjugating verbs for tense in English is an endless procession of case-by-case test questions. Whereas in Japanese, nearly all verbs fall into one of only two easy-to-learn tense conjugation patterns. Even better, it's instantly obvious which pattern most verbs fall under; only a small number of verbs may leave you uncertain.

Alas, there are also irregular verbs that don't conjugate into one of those two patterns. But cheer up: those irregulars can be counted, I'll guess, on two hands. With fingers left over. And they're among the most-used verbs, so you'll master their special ways very quickly.

In short, Japanese verbs yield almost no tricky grammatical surprises. Beautiful!

No superfluous conjugation. Per the above, Japanese verbs have useful conjugations, like present and past tense. But they lack the meaningless complexity of conjugation for person, i.e., the way the English be conjugates to I am, you are, he is, etc. And naturally, without plurals or noun genders, there are no ugly conjugations for those complications either.

Just the useful conjugations, nothing else. I like that.

Simplest questions ever

Q: Did you eat?
A: I ate.

What the heck? That's about the simplest Q&A you could think of, but the sentences don't even share a word in common. On top of that, the answer is a basic subject-verb sentence, while the question wedges its subject in between two halves of what should be a simple one-word verb. Ack, why must questions be so hard in English?

To make a question in Japanese, you just tack ka to the end of any statement – and that's all there is to it. I can't give any more explanation because there isn't any more. What could be easier?

Handy sentence-parsing markers

To make Japanese sentences, you'll make use of what are called particles: little markers like wa, ga, o, ni, de, e, etc. that denote the function of preceding words. Oddly, I've seen these described as one of the complex hurdles of the language. Far from it, in my estimation!

First, many of those fill the same function as English prepositions; they're your equivalents of at, by, with, to, etc. Sure, you'll find that it's not a one-to-one correspondence, and sometimes you'll have to use de to mean at, and sometimes ni to mean at, etc. But that's to be expected when comparing any two languages. No surprises or special difficulties so far.

What'll be new for most English speakers are the markers wa/ga for sentence topic/subject, and o for direct object. On the other hand, speakers of European languages who mark these in a similar way via noun cases shouldn't be too surprised by the concepts. And even English has an oddball equivalent of o: English pronouns, but only pronouns, change form when they're objects: I becomes me, they becomes them... she becomes her... while you remains you and it stays it...

Yikes, it's pretty messy when you look at it. This is another example of inconsistency that drives a learner of English nuts. In Japanese, all nouns and all pronouns just take o as objects. No exceptions.

At first, you may keep forgetting to use these markers at all. And the wa/ga distinction is admittedly a tricky one. But don't think of the markers as complexities; they simplify things and are the learner's friends!

Think about it: Here's a language that clearly marks each part of the sentence for you. Not just the "who, when, why" stuff that prepositions take care of in English, but you've also got clear markers for what's the topic or subject of the sentence, what's the direct object of the verb, and even what's the indirect object. It's like having a sentence laid open and dissected for you, all the parts tagged neatly and cleanly. (The only thing not tagged with a marker is the verb – and that's okay, because it's always in its predictable place at the end of the sentence.)

Sentences with every part neatly tagged by function. What more could you ask for as an aid to understanding?

Flexible word order

Those handy markers offer an additional bonus. With each sentence part's function clearly marked by particles, word order doesn't need to play that role of marking function. Thus, you can mix up the order of things quite a bit in many sentences, and the markers will still make clear what's what.

For example, while a verb is almost always the last part of a sentence, you could place other parts after it for stylistic reasons. Yet the verb's predictable form, and the remaining words' markers, still leave things clear.

True, there are some limits on how things can be jumbled and still make sense (or at least still sound natural), but you have far more flexibility than in English, which relies on a rigid word order to mark sentence parts. Word order is a lesser concern in Japanese.

Logical consistency

This is far too big a topic to argue here, and is one I expect will foster disagreement, followed by a crossfire of anecdotal support. The point: it's my opinion that Japanese is relatively good at following nice, logical patterns. (Relatively is a key qualifier. No human language has much truck with logical structure.)

As an opening salvo in the duel of anecdotes, here's the kind of thing I'm talking about: In English, I'll meet you in October, on Monday, at 3:30. That's three different prepositions for the same purpose: specifying a time. Japanese would logically use one time-denoting particle (ni) for all three time components.

This sort of consistency is easy to overlook, but really makes the student's job easier!

Easy pronunciation

It's easy to make yourself understood in spoken Japanese. The language simply has a pretty limited palette of sounds, probably few of which pose any difficulty to your native tongue. For you English speakers, only the sound written as r may prove new and require work, perhaps rya, ryu, ryo particularly so. (Many people seem to think that tsu is problematic as well, though there's no reason at all for creating this mental block. If you can say hot soup, you can say tsu.)

Japanese has limited consonants, all without tongue-wrecking Slavic combinations of those. Only five simple, pure vowels; say "so long" to crazy English dipthongs. No Chinese-style tones. Heck, there isn't even overt syllable stress to worry about! Ah, the life!

That said, no one's claiming that it's easy to sound native in Japanese (or in any foreign language, for that matter). Native speech is chock full of rhythms, timings, and subtle stresses that you may pick up smoothly, or may never catch on to. To add a specific complication, Japanese does use high and low pitches for some syllables, kind of a (very) simplified counterpart to Chinese tones. Fortunately, unlike Chinese tones, these subtleties generally aren't make-or-break comprehension issues in Japanese.

While I'll admit I've seen some English speakers do a spectacular job of mangling Japanese pronounciation, they're a minority. You'll probably have little problem mastering passable – or better – pronounciation.

English loanwords

As I mentioned in What's hard about learning Japanese, Korean speakers get a free pass where Japanese grammar is concerned, and Chinese readers get to take an extra trip around the gameboard when learning to read Japanese. English-savvy folk get a freebie too: a huge library of English words adopted into everyday Japanese. In fact, you'll find an almost ridiculous level of English "loanword" usage, even in instances when there are perfectly good Japanese words that would suffice.

The benefit: when you're stuck for the bon mot you need to complete your Japanese sentence, you can often fake it by retreating to an English term (and, sometimes, come across as trendily cultured in the process).

Of course, you'll need to first learn the "code" for rendering those words into Japanese syllables, and you'll need to catalog which English words get people nodding their heads and which just get them scratching the same. Also, be aware that humans don't often carry words across lingual borders without changes in meaning and usage; you'll have to revise your understanding of what some of those "English" words mean to your audience. Still, it's an initial freebie boost.

Incidentally, non-English languages shouldn't feel entirely left out; Japanese has borrowed words from here and there, in addition to the huge historical repertoire from Chinese. A number of medical, mountaineering, and camping terms, for example, have been taken from German. All you Alpine rescue paramedics, consider making Japan your next language-holiday destination!

More to come!

Readers: What else is easy about learning Japanese?

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