Hey Language Masters

Meaning, but not the reading, so the reading skill doesn't translate into speaking and vice versa.

That's true to some extent, but if you have enough of a vocabulary to actually read a book, you can usually guess the reading. And if not, you simply look it up in the dictionary.

If the book is online, you can just mouse over the word and a dictionary plugin will tell you

>tells you the exact meaning
And this is wrong too. Maybe they did back when they were first created, but after thousands of years some kanji make no sense whatsoever.
You have to look up a lot or grind your way through and memorize core 5k.
There is no other way.

Of course you have to look up a lot at first. How do you learn other languages?

There absolutely is more meaning in a kanji compound in Japanese than in the sounds alone.

If I know 溶ける (tokeru - to melt)
and 岩 (iwa - boulder)
I can guess the meaning of 溶岩 (yougan - lava). I would never be able to do that with just sounds

Of course compound words are easy. That the most basic shit.
The real challenge starts when you try to read hard literature from scans, where you cannot just hover over words or copypaste stuff into google to check the meaning.

With japanese you just have to do more, because "separate skills" like reading/listening don't translate properly. So i thinks it's reasonable to say that japanese is harder, especially for people from the western countries.

>With japanese you just have to do more, because "separate skills" like reading/listening don't translate properly.
This.

Compound words are what kanji are used in user. Once you get to a certain point most new words you learn are either complicated chinese compounds or are not written with kanji at all (i.e. they are completely alphabetic).

Japanese has no irregular plurals (or plurals at all), no irregular noun declensions, no irregular verbs (well maybe 2 or 3 mildly irregular ones), no grammatical gender, no declension of adjectives, an easy sound system, and a shit ton of materials to learn from online.

Think of all the irregular forms of words you avoid learning in Japanese, and then weigh that against a writing system that has a difficulty curve for beginners but actually simplifies vocabulary acquisition when you get to the intermediate level.

I studied Chinese m8, I know that learning Chinese characters is not that hard after you've passed a certain level.
What the Russian user says still stands true, as in both Chinese and Japanese the written language and the spoken language can be learnt without necessarily learning the other. In any language with a phonetic alphabet working on a single skill leads to massive improvements in the other skills too.

Declensions aren't even that hard after a while, mostly because your brain starts understanding what "sounds right" and what doesn't. And the German phonetic system is not much harder.

>complicated chinese compounds
These are the worst offenders. And most of them make no sense at all, you cannot just guess the meaning, you have to look stuff up.
Go try to play games like danganronpa in japanese.
And japanese also has a lot of stuff specific just to it, like multiple dialects, polite speech, gender specific speech, words for sounds.
And a lot of stuff that is unique to japanese, that has no alternative in western languages.

What are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that japanese is easy? Because its simply wrong.
Japanese is not impossible to learn, but it's the hardest language.

I'm trying to say Japanese is harder than many European languages because of the difference in vocabulary. It certainly is not the hardest language an English native could learn by a longshot.

>These are the worst offenders.
Not at all. Like my lava example they are often easy to guess both the meaning and pronunciation once your vocabulary gets to a certain point. The hard words to guess are usually the words written in kana.

German = easy
Japanese = Hard
Arabic & Chinese = Harder

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Lava example is the most basic shit and can easily be guessed.
>The hard words to guess are usually the words written in kana
Maybe in babybooks, but not in real literature.
But you would have known if you actually read it. So whatever.

>It certainly is not the hardest language an English native could learn by a longshot.
The hardest useful language. Chinese is easier.

What would be harder than Japanese?
Classical Chinese?

Look my droog, I'm better than you at Japanese. I can read books without a dictionary, watch movies without subtitles, and have a real conversation. There are still plenty of words I do not know, but the ones written in Chinese characters are usually easier than those that aren't, and it has been that way for awhile for me.

Japanese might be the hardest major language, I haven't learned others to know.

I guess. I don't really know much about Classical Chinese.
The modern chinese is easier because it has exact meaning, this is also why it's so easy to machine translate.

Alright, Ken-sama. I couldn't care less to prove anything to you at this point, so would like you to excuse me from this conversation.
You can go train with your katana.

Vietnamese is hard to learn and has Latin letters

German sucks to learn but much easier to learn than Japanese for, say, a person who already speaks a European language that uses the Latin alphabet.

I am not sure, but I would assume people like Koreans and Chinese would have an easier time learning Japanese than German because Japanese is more similar to their language than German is.