Re: Most challenging features of languages?

Joseph B. wrote:
> I'm curious to know which feature of a language (nat-, con-, or aux-) that
> individuals here found the most difficult to understand and/or master.
> Thanks.
>
The Japanese writing system. I never learned more than a few hundred
characters (and there are thousands), but I think I learned enough to
get an idea of the complexity. The tricky part is that characters can
have different readings depending on context. For instance, the
character 火 (fire) is pronounced "hi" in some words, as in 火鉢
"hibachi" and 花火 "hanabi" (hi -> bi is a regular substitution in
compounds), and "ka" in other words, such as 火曜日 "kayoubi" and 火山
"kazan". Then of course there are other characters pronounced "hi" and
"ka" that mean different things. So you end up memorizing words instead
of individual characters. Even some compounds have more than one
pronunciation, such as 一日 ("ichinichi" meaning "one day", or
"tsuitachi" meaning "first day of the month")! There may be fewer
characters in general use than in Chinese, but at least most Chinese
characters only have one pronunciation.

One thing that makes both Chinese and Japanese writing systems hard to
learn is that there are so many characters that look very similar to
another character. The first few dozen characters aren't that hard to
learn, since they all look more or less different from the others, but
when you get to the point that you're learning characters that are very
similar to the ones you've learned before, it's easy to confuse them.
Two that are especially similar are 土 ("tsuchi", etc. = "earth, soil")
and 士 (as in 富士山 Fujisan "Mt. Fuji" or 武士道 "bushido"). Even among
the hiragana and katakana, there are confusing pairs of similar
characters, like katakana ソ (so) and ン (n).

Then there's the problem that Japanese characters are written without
any spaces between words. This isn't as much of a problem as it could be
in an alphabetic language, because it's usually relatively easy to pick
out word endings written in hiragana, but it still makes it trickier
than it needs to be.