We’ve often heard that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, and not just because “ghoti can be pronounced “fish” or because we say things like “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes when we mean “Let’s see if people think this is a good idea” or “weapons of mass destruction when we mean “fabricated excuse to use those bombs that have been lying around”
English is a rich language, which is nice for poets, but can often be a hazard when clarity is desired. I got a phone call Saturday afternoon from what sounded like a very nice woman looking for the YMCA. I said, “You have the wrong number” She said, “I’m sorry” only I thought she was saying it in the interrogative, “I’m sorry? way, instead of the “I apologize way. So I said it again, more slowly and deliberately: “You have the wrong number” Which I’m sure she took to mean, “How dare you disturb me” When she said “I’m sorry again, I realized she had in fact been apologizing, so I apologized, too. I think we were both on the same page and singing from the same hymnal when the rubber met the road, and that no bad blood had passed over the dam.
I studied Japanese when I lived in Tokyo, and people always ask me if it’s a hard language to learn. It’s a hard language to read, because you have to memorize something like 500 characters to even be able to read a newspaper, but it’s not as hard to speak, and mostly because Japanese seemed to my unscientific analysis to have less variation than English. For instance, if you’re explaining something to someone in English and the concept begins to dawn, your interlocutor might say, “Oh, I get it or “That makes sense or “Now I understand” In Japanese, at least in my experience, 90 percent of the time the other person will say “naruhodo” which means something like “it becomes clearer” Much easier for the language student.
That doesn’t mean Japanese is without its pitfalls, of course. My ex-wife knew of one unlucky gaijin exchange student at a Japanese high school who was required to give a speech to the student body at the end of the term: in Japanese. He took the stage and came out with his opening line, which was supposed to be, “Because I am an exchange student I see much of the Japanese lifestyle” Due to three very simple mistakes in that one sentence “he drew out one vowel sound too long, transposed a consonant sound and paused where he shouldn’t have” he instead said, “Because my crotch stinks, I meet many Japanese policemen” Imagine how that would have gone over in your high school. He left the stage before his classmates had picked themselves up off the floor.