Differences between English and Japanese grammar

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I learned English for so long time ago and currently I start to do self-study about Japanese. And it is a hard language indeed, so in here I would like to point out some of the differences between the two languages grammar.

1 - Difference in Characters:

The most obvious difference between English grammar and Japanese grammar is probably the characters. In English, or Italian, or Frence, .etc…, all of these languages follow Latin characters from A to Z. However, Japanese grammar does not have Latin characters, it has its own 3 types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Sounds terrifying isn’t it? (atleast to me at first) While Latin script has 26 characters, Hiragana and Katakana script each has 46 and 45 characters. We also have to learn thousands of Kanji characters (based on Chinese characters) in which each character/word holds a difference meaning. So yes, in terms of characters. Japanese is hard.

2 - Difference in Verb Tense:

Unlike English grammar which has tons of verb tenses, ranging from past tense to the future tense and each tense has 4 forms: simple, progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive; Japanese grammar only has 2 verb tenses: past and present tense and each tense has formal and informal form. Verbs in Japanese has “masu” ending. In present tense, the positive form will be “masu”, negative form will be “masen”; and in past tense, the positive form changes to “mashita” and negative form changes to “masendeshita”. On the other hand, the formal and informal aspect are quite easy to get.

3 - Difference in Particles order:

So normally in English grammar we follow this order: Subject - Verb - Object, for example: “I eat rice.” But in Japanese grammar, the order is little bit different which is: Subject - Object - Verb. Sounds weird isn’t it? If we follow this order in English, the example above will be: “I rice eat.” Sounds nonsensical and funny, but actually that is how it works in Japanese. In Japanese, the sentence “I eat rice” will become “わたしはごはんを食べます” (watashi wa gohan wo tabemasu - I rice eat). This does not really hard to understand, however, I realize that I cannot just translate whatever sentence I saw into English since the two particles orders are different. And yes by translating, sometimes I got confused between the two languages.

So some of my friends said that English is harder to learn while some say otherwise. Personally to me it depends on our mother-tongue and our preference. In any cases, I still think Japanese is hard and it requires hard work.

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Having studied English for quite some time, I have to agree on some aspects, but first of all I just wanted to let you know ( you probably wrote that way for clarity sake) that there is no order in the Japanese clause, after all they have the particle ( and they work just like they do in Greek or In Latin ( though in these two they come before the word, not after, most of the time)).

Japanese is difficult for us, or for someone like me who is European, it will be way easier for Chinese people, just like for an Italian or a Spanish comes easy understand the meaning of quite a lot of English words!

Now that I think I have learned some words I think I can say that kanji per se are not that bad, reading them is a real pain, but they help in their own way! Can you imagine Japanese without kanji? I can’t, when I read and I see that kanji I know it’s meaning I can guess what’s the topic, and with just a glance it’s possible to understand the topic of the paragraph if you are skilled ( or so they say). I’m still struggling trying to conquer the ability to understand basic Japanese!
The problem, just like you said, is the sheer number, so high! And all the way they are read ( in Chinese reading kanji is way simpler, they are read in one way,) just like 生 that has more than 14 possibile readings. With the kanji is all good and well as long as you know that kanji, if you don’t you are stuck ( I have to use Google ocr or write somewhere with my mouse).

And last but not least Japanese has continuous forms, perfect and future, they use ている、てある、ておく! And there is the imperative and potential!

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I agree with you, especially in term of learning Japanese on the perspective of European people.
Japanese is kinda symbolic language while most European countries use Latin form, that is already a big difference. Not to mention all kind of Chinese characters in Japanese (Kanji).

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