Stop Overlooking All the Easy Aspects of Language Learning

“Why learn Japanese? It has too many characters!”

“Why learn French? I don’t understand why “fork” is feminine and “knife” masculine!”

“Why learning Mandarin? I’ll never pronounce words correctly!”

“Why learn German? Have you seen how long and complicated the words are?”

The list goes on. We’ve all said and heard many excuses not to learn a language. But is it really that hard?

Many people who have learned multiple languages weren’t good students of languages when they were younger. Did they choose “easy” languages? No, because there’s no such thing as an “easy language”. All languages present their own challenges. Just like all languages have easy aspects to learn.

Focusing on the challenges means abandoning all control. In reality, every language has at least one thing that makes it easier than others to learn. Most have many!

Don’t believe me? Well, see for yourself.

Japanese

3 different scripts used for a single language, one of them with thousands of characters?!

Sounds like a mess, right? That’s because it is! But if you look on the brighter side, Japanese has many aspects making it easy to learn:

• There’s no complicated conjugation. Learn the present (also used to express the future!) and past form and you’ll be done with verbs until you reach an advanced level.
• Its pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world. There aren’t exceptions and almost all sounds are easy to pick up for any foreigner.
• Don’t know a word in Japanese? Say the English one with a Japanese accent and it certainly exists! “Taxi” becomes “takushii”. “Computer” becomes “konpyuuta”. “Click” becomes “kurikku”. “Step” becomes “suteppu”. English words are everywhere.
• Those thousands of characters? Learn 300 and you can read 50% of texts. Learn 500 and you’ll be good for 75%.
• Its grammar is extremely straightforward and easy to remember.

French

Giving a gender to common nouns, come on. How are we supposed to learn this for every single noun?

You’re right, it takes time and you’ll make mistakes. Even French people make some! But the good news is that there are tips to remember the vast majority:

• Most words finishing with a consonant (other than n, s, t, and x) are masculine.
• Most words finishing with “-ion” are feminine.
• Many finishing with “e” are feminine, but most ending with “-age”, “ège”, “ème” or “ède” are masculine.
• If you still get some wrong, it doesn’t matter that much. Native speakers will always understand what you mean either way.
• The conjugation may be hard but you can skip the “we” for a while since most French people just use “on”, which follows the singular third-person form.
• About 30% of English words come from French! That’s as much vocabulary you don’t have to learn from scratch.

Mandarin

On top of thousands of characters, there are tones?!

Yes, learning Chinese seems like a beast of its own but, again, let’s focus on the positive:

• It has probably some of the easiest grammar structures these are.
• It doesn’t have gender nor conjugation. The verb “to eat” is used as it is in sentences.
• Using the wrong tones in a conversation won’t impede it because the context always makes things clear. Using the wrong tone in written form cannot happen either.
• By learning the characters, you can guess words you have never encountered. If you know that 最 means “the most” and 后 means “after” or “behind”, you can guess that 最后 means “finally” or “last”.

German

So now, you’re adding a third gender and creating extremely long words?

There’s a saying in French “Never two without three”. Too bad the Germans actually stole it in usage! Yes, there is a third gender in German, the neuter. And yes, words can be rather long. And yes, even nouns get “conjugated” based on where they are in the sentence. But German isn’t all “bad”:

Takeaways

Every language on the planet is both easy and hard. If you focus only on the scary parts, then you’ll never get started. You’ll always complain about that language.

If you choose to focus on the easy parts of a language, you can get moving and start learning it. Soon enough, you’ll notice what was scaring you wasn’t all that difficult to handle anyway!

Don’t focus on the negative, focus on the positive, and keep the journey fun! Of course, you’ll face challenges too, but by the time you do, you’ll already be hooked and won’t give up anymore.

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