Learning Japanese as a German speaker: easier than you think

Japanese is considered one of the hardest languages in the world, at least according to internet legend. What gets lost: these rankings mostly come from American sources and measure the distance from English. For German speakers, the maths looks friendlier in several places, and in others Japanese is equally hard for everyone, no matter where you are from. This article honestly sorts out what you get for free as a German speaker, what is simply different, and where the real work lies. Spoiler: there are more gifts than you think.

Gift 1: pronunciation

The biggest surprise first: nearly all Japanese sounds already exist in German. Japanese has a pure system of five vowels (a, i, u, e, o) that sound almost exactly like short German vowels. No English "th", no French nasals, no Chinese tones. Words like さくら (sakura) or たべます (tabemasu) can be pronounced intelligibly from day one if you simply read them like a German word. The few stumbling blocks, such as the Japanese r that sits between r, l and d, are polish, not obstacles.

Gift 2: the grammar is forgiving

Anyone who has taught German as a foreign language knows what learners suffer through: der, die, das, four cases, plural forms, irregular verbs without end. Japanese does away with almost all of it.

• 🌸No articles: there is no the and no a. 猫 (neko) means cat, the cat or a cat, and context sorts it out.
• 🌸No grammatical gender: never again memorising whether a spoon is masculine, feminine or neuter.
• 🌸No plural forms: 本 (hon) is one book or many books. No endings, no exceptions.
• 🌸Extremely regular conjugation: there are exactly two truly irregular verbs, する (suru, to do) and 来る (kuru, to come). For comparison: English has around 200.
• 🌸Verbs do not change by person: 行く (iku) means I go, you go, we go. One form for everyone.

The secret home advantage: the verb at the end

Japanese puts the verb at the end of the sentence, with a basic structure of subject, object, verb. For English speakers this is a mental contortion. For German speakers it is not, because you do exactly the same in every subordinate clause: "…weil ich morgen nach Tokio fahre." The verb lands at the very end, and your brain effortlessly holds everything in suspense until it arrives. The Japanese sentence 明日東京に行きます (ashita Tōkyō ni ikimasu, literally: tomorrow Tokyo to go) follows precisely this logic. The particles that scare so many learners are also half familiar to German speakers: は marks the topic, が the subject, を the direct object. If you can tell nominative from accusative, and as a German speaker you can, the principle clicks immediately.

Where the real work is

To be fair: there are areas where German does not help you, because they are equally new for every learner. The writing system is the biggest hurdle: hiragana and katakana are doable in one or two weeks, but the roughly 2,000 everyday kanji are a multi year project that demands a system and patience. The second adjustment is the politeness levels: depending on who you are talking to, Japanese switches between plain, polite and honorific speech. The German distinction between du and Sie is at least a miniature version of the idea, but the Japanese system is graded much more finely. Both are manageable, with the right methods even plannable, but pretending these hurdles do not exist would be dishonest.

Your roadmap to get started

1. 1Weeks 1 and 2: learn hiragana and katakana. This is the point where Japanese stops looking like a secret code.
2. 2Months 1 to 3: core grammar and your first 300 to 500 words, with a textbook or course plus a vocabulary trainer.
3. 3From month 2: your first kanji via radicals and mnemonics, five to ten a day.
4. 4From the very start: listen to Japanese every day and repeat out loud. Your pronunciation is your head start, after all.

Frequently asked questions

Japanese is not an impenetrable fortress, it is a language with a surprisingly fair entry point, especially for German speakers. You get the pronunciation as a gift, the grammar forgives more than any European language, and your brain already knows the sentence structure. That leaves the writing system, and with the right method that is a question of time, not talent. Start with hiragana, and the rest follows step by step.