And you thought English was hard!

I’ve always thought that Japanese was one of the harder foreign languages (I struggled through basic Spanish in high school and college). But when I read this article on Yahoo!, I have a new-found respect for those who can read, write and speak Japanese.

Why is Japanese such a hard language? This gives you a good idea:

Just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Another 50,000 are less common but useful to recognize.

And it gets harder from there:

Most characters have several different pronunciations depending on the context. For instance, the two characters in the prime minister’s surname can be read several ways. The first character, which means linen, is pronounced "asa" or "ma." The second — meaning life, raw, or to occur or grow — can be pronounced "nama," "sei," "sho," or "ki," to list just a few possibilities. And together, they are pronounced "Aso"
(Ah-so).

So the next time you mistaken "their" for "they’re" remember that it could be a lot worse. However, I’m in no way trying to diminish the challenges of English, especially for those learning it as a second language, as English also has its own difficulties.

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