How we invented new ways to teach Japanese

According to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, Chinese and Japanese are in the same category of difficulty (2200 hours).

But, there's an important distinction. Japanese is singled out as "somewhat more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category."

As the they say in the article, Japanese is classified among the most difficult languages for English speakers by Foreign Service Institute and this is widely cited as a fact. But interestingly, no research data on this was ever published. (The institute presented the facts as based on their internal research, but no methods, results or anything was ever published. Nowadays the original page has disappeared from the internet.)

Bill VanPatten, a linguist that specialises on second/foreign language acquisition lamented this on his podcast, Tea With BVP. According to him, there isn't any published research that shows that one language as a whole would be more difficult as another one for speakers of some other language. (He is not speaking about writing systems but about spoken language there – Japanese has obviously very complicated writing system.)

I shameless self-plug: As a successful Japanese learner (and since then, a Japanese teacher and recently a software engineer in a Japanese company), I was interviewed recently about learning Japanese: https://www.koipun.com/blog/learning-japanese-by-listening-a...

Why should you possibly be interested: because not only did I learn Japanese and taught it, I also did a fair part of reading about the research on language acquisition and neurolinguistics as a part of my master's studies, so I know what I'm talking about.

I started a project to be able to conjugate as many languages as I could and I'd love to accept Japanese if anybody is up for the challenge: https://github.com/llipio/conjugator

So far, I've managed to understand enough korean, spanish, and french grammar to review merge requests. Its interesting reading stories of how HN community picked up Japanese, some of the suggestions are pretty helpful.

I suspect it depends on why you're learning. As you say learning languages is hard, especially as an adult.

I couldn't imagine learning a language for "fun", but I know others do. I can easily imagine a lot of them dropping-out and giving up, once they've either learned enough to be useful or decided it is not for them.

But me? I've moved from Scotland to Finland. I'm very slowly learning the language. I don't expect I'll ever be fluent, but I need to try. People who move abroad, and avoid learning the language are not so well respected, and rightly so.

Thus far I've managed to have medical treatment, buy a flat, and do lots of complex things in English, but it would still be better for me to learn Finnish. If only so people don't need to switch languages, solely for my benefit, at parties, etc. (That's appreciated, but also a constant reminder of how much I suck!)