I have a question for students of Japanese. I have researched this question, but have yet to find the answer. I mean this as an honest question, not as an attempt to start a fight.

Why is Japanese so hard?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

According to that, on the average, Japanese is slightly harder to learn than Chinese. Why? I have researched the question and have only found two areas where Japanese is definitely worse than Chinese. Those areas are grammar and the fact that pronunciation is a bit more homogenized. Chinese has a ton more character, tones, tones, tones and, oh yah, tones. The rest of the problematic parts seem to balance out or end with a slight leaning in Chinese's favor. There is evidently some nightmare here lurking under the surface that I am not finding. Any Japanese students care to vent for a few and/or enlighten me?

(You Japanese students don't post on the forums nearly a often as the Chinese ones. I can't just sneak in and discretely read your threads.)

My Japanese is limited to calling George's mother over there an elephant and asking what we're eating, but I do remember a good discussion on this issue on John Pasden's post on the subject:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/25/learning-curves-chinese-vs-japanese

That sounds kind of like asking whether it's worse to be burned to death or to be pulled apart by horses. ;P

I can't really compare either, as I don't learn Chinese. But what I find difficult about Japanese is that each kanji can be pronounced in so many different ways, and very often its some kind of "kyo" or "shu". So you can't just learn a kanji, you need to learn many combinations as in each it is pronounced differently.

I am a bit surprised that Japanese grammar is thought to be so complicated. I was very pleased when I first started to learn Japanese that the grammar has so few complications. No plural, no conjugation, no declination, adjectives all remain the same (there is really only the past-tense of adjective, which is a strange concept, but easy to learn), only 2 (!!!) irregular verbs, no gender of words... So actually being able to say some really basic stuff was fairly easy. It gets more complicated over time - or my brain gets older ;-)

I'm studying both. In my experience, I think the characters make Chinese hard, but learning to speak it doesn't seem so bad because sentence structure seems pretty similar to English.

Japanese requires two phonetic alphabets plus kanji, which seems to be a mixture of both simplified and traditional Chinese forms for the most part. The hardest part of the language is sentence structure. Compared to English, it's very much like Yoda-speak ("About him, quickly to school this morning went."). So, I can't just say things I want to say... I have to think about the order.

I don't know enough about Mandarin particles, but so far, the Japanese ones seems more difficult.

Finally, Japanese has lots of verb conjugations that need memorized and don't seem to exist in Chinese.

Again, I might be off base since my Mandarin studies are still less than a year old, and limited mostly to Skritter and a couple of pen pals, but I think Japanese is quite clearly the harder of the two languages.

Learning Japanese vocab is not all about learning Kanji, which is only one of the three categories of the Japanese vocab. The other two are Japanese’s own native vocab, plus the more recent 外来語 which are transliteration of foreign words not borrowed from Chinese. Many concepts have a representation in each category and ends up with 3 words meaning the same thing. For example, “cooked rice” can be written as 飯 and read as はん[han] (a sound coming from Chinese) or めし[meshi] (the native Japanese reading) or written as ライス and read as [raisu] (transliteration of rice). One must learn all these different representations as they are used in different contexts. The end result is Japanese requires a working vocabulary two to three times as large as Chinese and that is why it’s more difficult.

I don't know about Chinese but I agree with what susannekaiser said about having multiple readings for a single kanji but would add that their are multiple Kanjis for a single reading. This makes example sentences extremely important. Unfortunately Skritter doesn't have example sentences. There seems to be no single program or book that covers everything well. I am also in a agreement with jcdoss. I have watched tons of Anime but have picked up almost no Japanese from watching it, I believe this is because of grammar differences. I have heard of Koreans (their grammar is similar) who could pick up Japanese from just watching Japanese dramas. Japanese also leaves out a lot of words you or I would consider important and rely on GD context to fill in the blanks. So if you didn't understand what someone just said, you probably won't understand what they are talking about next.

There's also an interesting difference posited by ULN in the depth of Chinese's vocabulary before it turns into internationalese rivaling English, where Japanese is shallower:
http://chinayouren.com/en/2009/11/23/2530

pts, what would you say about that idea? "Rice" is a basic word that has expressions in each idiom influencing Japanese, but the argument is that for many of the most advanced words, there becomes only one way to say it which is similar and guessable from other languages, so that there isn't actually as much vocab to learn.

I don't think Japanese is as hard as Chinese.

Hmmm... Thanks all. I understand a bit more now. I suppose the only way I will entirely understand is if I study it myself. The problem is that I already know quite a few simplified characters and am currently working on the traditional ones. Kanji would never be a serious problem for me and that is part of the overall difficulty. Oh well.

@bulake - I have heard other people express your opinion as well. It seems to very slightly from person to person.

Yes, I keep saying “McDonald's” without ever learning the proper pronunciation マクドナルド [Makudonaludo] and Japanese people can still understand me. I’ve figured out トランス [toransu] means “transformer” without looking up any dictionary. Some years ago, I have a special “word processing machine” that the Japanese calledワープロ [wāpuro], and now I’ve changed to use an application (i.e. Word) running on my notebook and they called that application asワープロ‐ソフト[wāpuro sofuto]. All these words are not difficult to learn, but each one still counts as a word to be learned. And knowing トランス doesn’t mean I don’t have to learn 変圧器.

It's all relative. Chinese is hard if your first language is English or Spanish; not so much if it is Japanese or Korean. If you already know a language that has tones the difficulty level of Chinese drops down another notch. Common sense, right?

I find Japanese to be easy: I can easily reproduce most, if not all, of the sounds. I STILL can't roll an "r" in Spanish and I took two years of it in high school. Learning the rest of the language -- grammar, vocabulary, etc. -- just takes time and dedication. For me it's close to impossible to change my accent.

What people find to be "difficult" varies from person to person. I can do one-arm pullups but I can't touch my toes. For most people the former is much harder than the latter.

I went through the links and couldn't understand why so many people compare learning French to Chinese. French is as similar to English as tennis is to racquetball: It's basically the same thing with only slightly different rules and equipment.