Is Japanese Easier Than French? A Surprising Answer From an American

The other day, I watched a video of several Americans who speak fluent Japanese chatting with one another.

The topic was: “Do you speak any foreign languages besides Japanese?”

Most of them said they barely spoke anything else. But one man said he spoke French about as well as he spoke Japanese.

Naturally, the conversation turned to which one had been harder.

His answer surprised me.

“For me, Japanese was easier.”

English and French share a huge amount of vocabulary, and they use the same alphabet. Japanese, on the other hand, has a completely different grammar and a completely different writing system.

And yet he said Japanese was easier.

When I heard his reasons, it made sense.

French Has Too Many Rules

According to them, English is a relatively simple language grammatically.

Over its history, English lost most of its grammatical gender and complex word endings. Today its verb conjugation is fairly simple, and nouns are not divided into masculine and feminine.

French, however, still has masculine and feminine nouns.

Articles and adjectives change to match the gender of the noun, and verb conjugation is complicated.

For an English speaker, many of the words look familiar, yet you still have to follow one small rule after another.

On top of that, many French people apparently tend to be strict about grammar.

Japanese, by contrast, has no grammatical gender. You don’t have to mark singular and plural. And people drop the subject all the time.

“Kinō, Tōkyō, itta.” Word for word: “Yesterday, Tokyo, went.”

No “I,” no “to,” and it still gets the message across.

Japanese is also quite forgiving about word order.

Whether you say “Yesterday I went to Tokyo” or “I went to Tokyo, yesterday,” the meaning comes through.

In extreme cases, you can even put the verb first, something like “Went, yesterday, Tokyo,” and people still understand what you mean.

In English, getting the word order wrong can change the meaning entirely. “The dog bit the man” is not “The man bit the dog.” In Japanese, small grammatical markers called particles, along with context, fill in the meaning.

If French is a language that makes you follow every small rule, Japanese may be a language that says, “Well, I get what you mean, so that’s fine.”

At the very least, the barrier to starting everyday conversation is probably much lower than people imagine.

But Japanese Has Particles

As a native Japanese speaker, I understand this feeling.

When foreigners speak somewhat broken Japanese, I rarely have trouble understanding what they mean.

But once they try to speak natural, accurate Japanese, everything changes.

Take the particles “wa” and “ga.”

“Watashi wa Tanaka desu” and “Watashi ga Tanaka desu.” Both mean “I am Tanaka.”

Both are grammatically correct, but they are used in different situations. The first is how you introduce yourself. The second is how you answer when someone asks, “Which one of you is Tanaka?”

Japanese people choose between them without thinking. But ask us to explain the difference to a foreigner, and we are suddenly stuck.

And it is not just particles. Honorific language, sentence endings, and word choice all demand subtle instincts if you want to sound natural.

At the entrance, Japanese welcomes you with “Don’t worry, you’ll be understood even if it’s rough.” Then, once you reach an advanced level, the grading suddenly becomes strict.

And Japanese people themselves cannot properly explain the grading criteria.

It is a rather mean-spirited language.

And Then There Is the Huge Mountain of Kanji

On top of that, Japanese has kanji, Chinese characters that were adopted into the Japanese language.

This is where it gets painful.

Even after you can hold a conversation, reading a newspaper or a book requires memorizing a huge number of kanji.

And a single kanji can have several readings.

The character 生 alone can be read “sei,” “shō,” “nama,” “ikiru,” “umareru,” and more, depending on whether it means life, raw, to live, or to be born.

Just when you think you have learned a kanji, its reading changes depending on the word it appears in.

Japanese also switches among three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. And there are countless words that sound the same but mean different things.

Japanese children spend years studying kanji, starting in elementary school.

Foreigners have to master this as adults, so it must be a tremendous struggle.

Japanese may be surprisingly easy if you only want to speak it.

But if you want to use it freely, including reading and writing, the difficulty suddenly skyrockets.

Is Japanese Kind to Beginners and Harsh to Experts?

In the end, I think whether French or Japanese is harder depends on what you are aiming for.

With French, you have to learn detailed grammar rules from the very beginning.

With Japanese, conversation works even if you make some mistakes. That makes it easier to feel early on that “I can speak it now.”

But using particles accurately, handling natural honorifics, and reading and writing kanji bring a different kind of struggle.

Come to think of it, I have been studying English for years, and I still sometimes hesitate between the articles “a” and “the.”

So when I see foreigners agonizing over “wa” and “ga,” I feel a little sympathy.

But English has no kanji.

On that point alone, I am glad to be an English learner.

Japanese welcomes everyone at the entrance.

But go deeper, and there is an exam on particles, and beyond that rises the mountain of kanji.

And even after you climb that mountain, you are told to “read the air”—to sense what everyone expects without anyone saying it.

For foreigners, the final barrier of Japanese might actually be that.