Why Japanese is so hard to learn (and what's easy about it!)
Last updated: September 22, 2025
Let’s be honest: if you want to learn Japanese to any decent level of proficiency, it’s going to take a solid chunk of time. The United States State Department classifies Japanese as a “super-hard language”. The path to fluency isn’t a short one.
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, there are some things about learning Japanese that English speakers might even find surprisingly easy!
Let’s look at some of the ways learning Japanese is especially difficult—and especially easy—for native English speakers.
[TL;DR] Why the Japanese language is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers
The biggest roadblock for native English speakers learning Japanese is simply that it’s so different from anything you’re used to.
The above chart shows what's called lexical similarity, or how much two languages' vocabulary overlaps.
If you'd set out to learn French, for example, you'd get 27% of the vocab for basically free (i.e., organization → organisation ). What's more, French sentences will be structured in a way that seems logical, there will be obviously corresponding grammar points, and some phrases are literally just the same in both languages. All of this overlap gives English learners of French a pretty big leg up.
With Japanese, you get basically none of that.
In each of the four points below, note that they can basically be boiled down to "Japanese X works completely differently than English X".
And that makes learning Japanese hard.
3 reasons why Japanese is hard to learn
First: the bad news.
- Yes, learning Japanese is hard.
- More than anything, it’s time-consuming, requiring a lot of memorization.
More particularly, here are four of the biggest pain-points for Japanese learners.
1. The Japanese writing system is a massive clusterfunk
You’ve probably heard the Japanese writing system is hard—and unfortunately, that’s right.
Unlike many languages, which have one way of writing the words that make up the language, Japanese has three. These are:
- Hiragana (ひらがな ): Japan’s native phonetic script, a phonetic syllabery consisting of characters that each correspond to a sound—a vowel, a consonant-vowel pair, or the N sound. In writing, hiragana is used mostly for grammatical particles, verb endings, and simple words.
- Katakana (カタカナ ): Another phonetic syllabary, containing the same 46 sounds as hiragana but written with more angular, blocky characters. Katakana is primarily used for foreign loanwords (like パソコン (pasokon) for “personal computer”), for onomatopoeia, and also for emphasis (similar to how we use italics).
- Kanji (漢字 ): This is the main event. Kanji are logographic characters borrowed from Chinese, where each character represents an idea or a word. You’ll need to memorize over 2,000 of them to achieve basic newspaper-level literacy.
Unfortunately, it gets worse from here.
💡 Insight 💡
The vast majority of kanji characters have at least two ways to be read— a Chinese onyomi reading and a Japanese kunyomi reading —and while you can semi-reliably know which category of reading to use, most characters have multiple of each, and there isn't a way to logically work out which character to use.
For example, the character for "life," 生, can be read as <sei>, <shō>, <i>, <u>, <nama>... and more, depending on the context.
The silver lining is that, because each character means something, once you learn enough kanji, learning new words gets easier: even if you've never seen a word before, the kanji will give you a rough idea of what it means. You'll eventually come to love kanji, but, early on, they're a massive hurdle that will make it difficult to follow any sort of written Japanese media, whether books or manga or subtitles.
2. Japanese grammar is basically the opposite of English grammar
If you’re a native English speaker, Japanese grammar will rewire your brain.
💡 Insight 💡
English sentences are organized as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), but Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Generally speaking, Japanese sentences will be structured in a way that feels "backwards" to you.
Here's a very basic example:
- English: I (S) eat (V) an apple (O).
- Japanese: 私は (S) りんごを (O) 食べます (V). (Watashi wa ringo o tabemasu.)
Then, whereas in English you pretty much just take words and put them in the right order, in Japanese you have to tag words with grammatical particles—such as the を and は in the above sentence—which explicitly clarify the grammatical function of the tagged word. These have no direct equivalent in English. In other words, Japanese people are actually saying this: I <topic> apple <direct object> eat.
Finally, Japanese is a highly contextual language. This manifests in several ways. One concrete example is that the subject of a sentence is often omitted if it's rendered obvious by context: you'd just say eats an apple and lean on context to figure out who is eating the apple. Whereas most English sentences can be accurately understood even out of context, you'll have to be much more active about keeping track of the "invisible subject" of a conversation. This is a skill in and of itself.
3. Formality and politeness is basically a mini-language within Japanese
In English, being polite is pretty straightforward: you add a few key words (like "please" or "thank you") into a sentence, swap a few words out for more formal variants ("John" to "Mr. Smith"), and might avoid certain topics.
💡 Insight 💡
As covered in our introduction to keigo , being polite in Japanese basically involves learning a second mini-language. Even Japanese people need to brush up on it when they enter the workforce.
For the learner, this just means several things:
- You'll need to learn two new sets of conjugations for most verbs, one honorific and one humble
- You'll need to learn entirely new words for some concepts: the normal word for "to do" is する , the humble version is いたす , and the honorific version is なさる
- To determine whether to use the non-polite, polite, humble, or honorific language mentioned above, you'll need to understand how Japanese social hierarchies work and things like "in-group" / "out-group" (called 内-外 , uchi-soto)
- You'll need to learn several new social "scripts" about the proper way to handle routine social interactions
This adds a layer of social calculation to every interaction—indeed, to every sentence uttered—that requires significant practice to master.
4 reasons why Japanese isn't so difficult to learn after all
Now for the good news! For all of its daunting challenges, Japanese is also very uniform and logical in ways English is not. While much of the language will be challenging until you get a firmer grasp on that logic, you'll be able to enjoy some of these "benefits of consistency" right away.
1. Japanese pronunciation is relatively straightforward
Whereas English pronunciation is basically a guessing game (think tough, thought, through), Japanese pronunciation is very consistent.
There are five basic vowel sounds:
- a
- i
- u
- e
- o
And Japanese syllables are either these five vowels, a consonant-vowel pair, or an N sound. For example, here are the consonant-vowel pairs with M:
- Ma
- Mi
- Mu
- Me
- Mo
If you want to develop a really strong accent, you will run into a few challenges:
- These vowel sounds never change, which will be really weird for native English speakers (we turn a lot of vowels into "uh" sounds—compare the English vs Japanese pronunciation of "banana" to see what I mean: EN vs JA )
- English words have a stress accent (a certain syllable in each word gets a bit of extra oomph—compare INsight vs inCITE), but Japanese has what's called pitch accent (each word has a certain "melody" of pitches—"insect" and "ignore" are both pronounced "mushi", but "insect" starts on a low pitch whereas "ignore" starts on a high pitch: mu↑SHI (虫) vs MU↓shi (無視) )
- There are a few subtle differences between English and Japanese phonemes (sounds)—compare Japanese "mu" vs English "moo" , for example
💡 Insight 💡
Generally speaking, even if you don't think about pronunciation or go out of your way to practice, Japanese people will be able to understand what you're saying just fine.
2.Lack of gender or plurals in nouns
If you've ever struggled to remember whether a table is masculine or feminine in French or Spanish, you can breathe a sigh of relief.
💡 Insight 💡
Japanese nouns have no gender. A desk is a desk. A chair is a chair.
Additionally, there’s very few plurals in Japanese:
- The word 猫 (neko) can mean “a cat” or “cats.”
- The word 本 (hon) can mean “a book” or “books.”
The quantity is either understood from the context, or specified with counter words. This eliminates a massive amount of memorization that bogs down learners of many other languages.
3. Logical and consistent grammar
Wait, didn't we just say grammar was hard?
Well, while the structure of Japanese sentences is different and will require adjusting to, the rules of Japanese grammar are remarkably consistent once you've gotten them down.
- Very Few Irregular Verbs: English is notorious for irregular verbs (such as go, went, and gone, or eat, ate, and eaten). Japanese has only two truly irregular verbs (する, suru, meaning “to do”; and 来る, kuru, meaning “to come”) plus a handful of slightly irregular words. In other words, once you learn a conjugation pattern, you can instantly apply it to thousands of verbs.
- Simple Tenses: Japanese basically has two tenses: past and non-past. The non-past tense is used for both present and future actions. You don't have to learn a dozen different tense conjugations like in some Romance languages. (Instead, many of English's tenses are replicated via fixed grammatical structures. Whereas we use the present perfect tense to talk about experiences—I have gone to France—Japanese just says "I to France goed" and tacks on the ~ことがある structure which indicates that you have the experience of doing the verb.)
- Consistent Adjectives: Japanese adjectives also conjugate, but they do so in a very regular way. There are only two types of adjectives (i-adjectives end in ~い while na-adjectives end in ~な), and once you learn the rules for each type, you can apply them consistently.
The grammar works like a set of building blocks. Once you learn the function of each block (particles, verb endings), you can assemble them into sentences in predictable ways.
Bonus: Tools and resources are abundant
For whatever reason, Japan as a culture has attracted the sort of nerds that like building useful tools. Whether you're into apps, textbooks, podcasts, YouTube channels, or pretty much anything else—you'll enjoy a selection and quality that learners of most other languages will make other learners jealous.
From there, the global popularity of Japanese culture means there is a staggering amount of Japanese content available for you once you approach the intermediate level.
There has never been a better time to learn Japanese.
(A bit of encouragement)
Depending on where you were coming into this article, you might be feeling a bit bummed out right about now. Japanese very well may be looking much more complicated than you'd initially expected.
With this in mind, we'd like to make a suggestion that might seem a bit weird: instead of thinking about how diffcult it is, think about what draws you to Japanese.
It will take you some time to get through basic beginner vocabulary and grammar points, but before long you'll reach a point where you can kind of stumble through Japanese media with a bit of assistance. As you go on, you'll need progressively less assistance until you can eventually function entirely independently. Importantly, in the big picture, the vast vast vast majority of the time you devote to learning Japanese will end up being spent using the language to do things you personally find interesting.
And this is why it's so important that there's presumably something concrete and awesome that is pulling you toward Japanese. Maybe you’re interested in Japanese culture, or are a big manga fan. Maybe the idea of living in Japan calls to you. Maybe you're into JRPGs. Whatever your "thing" is, it's super important that you have something that will regularly drive you to spend time interacting with the world in Japanese.
Let me promise you this:
In the long run, you will be way better off if you learn Japanese because you love it, despite the difficulty, than if you go for an "easier" language that you aren't really interested in. If you don't feel a burning desire to consume lots of media in another language, you likely won't ever make it out of the early-intermediate stage.
How to learn Japanese
You're probably here because you're thinking about learning Japanese but are feeling nervous.
If that's the case—here's how to learn Japanese in five steps.
Learn hiragana and katakana
Your first task is to take a crash course in Japanese's two syllabries, hiragana and katakana.
In Migaku's Japanese Fundamentals course, we do this by providing you with a mnemonic image to tie each kana character to a close English sound, then give you flashcards with audio from native speakers to consolidate that knowledge.
Learn frequently-occurring kanji
After finishing the kana, you're ready to move onto kanji.
Migaku's Kanji Course provides a mnemonic-based strategy to learning the kanji, then applies it to teach you the meanings of the most common ~800 characters. This is a solid enough base that, moving forwards, you'll be able to learn the remaining characters by applying our system on new characters as you encounter them.
Learn the most common 1,500 vocabulary words
We've got a whole blog post about how to learn Japanese vocabulary, but the most important takeaway is that vocabulary words are not used equally often. While a native speaker knows tens of thousands of words, you only need to learn about 1,500 words to have an 80% chance of recognizing any random word you put your finger on.
Migaku teaches you the 1,500 words you need to start watching Netflix in Japanese (plus about 300 basic grammar points) via a flashcard-based course. It's special because:
- Instead of memorizing grammar points, you'll acquire them by practicing practical sentences that feature them
- Each sentence has been carefully curated such that it introduces only one new word or grammar point
- A spaced repetition algorithm periodically nudges you to review sentences over time, ensuring that you won't forget them
Extract learning opportunities from media you personally enjoy
With this base of vocabulary, kanji, and grammar under your belt, you'll be ready to start exploring real Japanese media—with a bit of support.
Migaku takes Japanese text pretty much anywhere—in manga, movies, YouTube videos, podcasts (which you have an .mp3 file for), and text-based websites—and makes it interactive. Simply click on words in sentences or subtitles to see what they mean.
If a word looks useful, you can turn it into a spaced-repetition flashcard in less than a second:
Repeat
It'll be a bit of a challenge to find the perfect first piece of content—something that is interesting but also accessible—but once you've crossed that bridge, you're pretty much set. As you spend more time consuming the media you personally find interesting, you'll gradually acquire the words and grammar points you need to know in order to more effortlessly do those things.
From here on out, getting better at Japanese basically comes as a byproduct of entertaining yourself.
It's pretty awesome.
So, is Japanese the hardest language in the world?
We'll leave that up to you.
Is Japanese hard? Yes; its writing system and grammar especially will challenge you in new ways. It demands dedication, and a different way of thinking. But is it impossible? Absolutely not. The challenge is part of the adventure. With the right mindset and a consistent effort, you can absolutely succeed.
Importantly, they are a ton of awesome resources out there for Japanese beginners... and once you get over those early stages, you only need to follow one simple rule to continue learning:
If you consume Japanese media you enjoy, and you understand at least some of the message and sentences within that media, you will get better. Period.