> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.
Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)
Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.
The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.