- It’s in bumfuck nowhere
- I don’t speak Japanese
- Building it up to a modern living standard will be expensive
- I’d have to move to Japan
Unsorted list of reasons why not from the top of my head
I think those first 2 cancel each other out.
It’s not that bad
Looking on maps it’s in a rural area but not that rural. The house is situated on the outskirts of a town, basically
Local middle schools website says they had 185 students in 2020, that’s pretty good for rural Japan
About a 30m walk from the town/school. Train station there, bunch of cafes, konbini.
It’s not going to be living in Tokyo obviously but there are rural areas in Japan that are far worse, where the school is 7 kids that all share a classroom even though they’re mixed grade 2-9 because the district has 1 teacher
Bigger reason for me: that house is decrepit and Japan experiences more natural disasters than pretty much any other country. Like I’m not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
The language isn’t that hard though. プラス、それからもっと漫画を読めるよ。
The language isn’t that hard though
Gonna go ahead and press X to doubt on that. Japanese is consistently ranked among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, alongside Mandarin and Arabic.
If I can learn it anyone can. I am straight up stupid. Full disclosure though: while I can write it pretty well (with a phone or pc, no fucking way I can do it by hand) my speech is mixed. When I talk to Japanese people they say “wow! Your Japanese is so good!” Which means it’s not very good hahah
Mandarin is way harder because it’s alllll kanji and the speaking in tones stuff is so much more nuanced
I’m pretty sure it’s ranked hard because you have to learn an alternative alphabet. But this is not really that tough. You can learn hiragana fairly quickly. Katakana is not nearly as necessary as you might think. Then learning kanji does admittedly take forever but often you’ll see things are either written in hiragana, only use the most basic of kanji, or if they use fancy kanji they have the hiragana next to it anyway (like a phonetic spelling)
The grammar is a little challenging:
Subject verb object - I sushi eat instead of I eat sushi
The subject gets dropped and implied; the language is heavily contextual. I eat it - 食べます (tabemasu) - i (implied) eat it (implied). This is why llm and machine language translation stinks at Japanese, because it can’t really know context from a single line (though it’s improving, chatgpt got that right though deepl said “I’ll eat”, which isn’t wrong, strictly and did give both I’ll eat it and I’ll have some as alternatives)
Then there’s particles like は wa and が ga which mark the subject and topic, respectively. English doesn’t really have an equivalent.
But this isn’t harder as much as it’s nuance imo. The writing system and alphabet is harder, objectively. There’s 46 hiragana and over 100 if you include the additional forms (which is misleading a bit) then basically the same number of katakana, then about 2,000 kanji in use. That’s a lot to learn but it’s basically an extension of learning vocab
Now should you learn Japanese? That’s a tough one. Stagnant economy, falling birth rate year after year, etc. but your goals are your own and don’t have to be practical
Now should you learn Japanese?
Me? Yes, probably. I’ve been promising my wife I’d do it for like… almost 3 years? 🤦
Today is the day, here is your sign
Anki and tae Kim
Don’t fuck with Duolingo, waste of money
Kanji have extremely inconsistent pronunciation. It is one of the worst things about learning the language. It’s not just 2000, it’s 2000, most with multiple readings, many with exceptional readings.
Yeah, even some simple ones you learn early on like 日 will have 5+ readings. Daily Kanji practice is what really made it hard for me to keep learning and why i gave up after only a few months.
I feel like I learn a new reading for 生 every couple years
