Comment by daft_pink
4 days ago
I've been told the one reason why Japanese is so hard to learn is because there is an underlying etiquette and social hierarchy built into the language and it is not simply being able to understand and speak the words.
Native speakers tolerate errors when it's obvious someone is non-native, but become offended when they speak it perfectly, but screw up the social heirarchy, so it's extremely hard to progress beyond a certain point.
Heh that’s overstated. As a non Asian foreigner*, you get a lot of leeway for making mistakes when speaking Japanese, as it is somehow ingrained in the subconscious here that Japanese is very special and very complicated and a foreigner trying to speak it is already doing something near impossible.
If your Japanese is near flawless except for the honorific register that would strike people as weird, but then what did you do to end up speaking flawless Japanese without ever properly internalizing honorific Japanese?
*(If you are an Asian foreigner, you are subject to many other layers of prejudice unrelated to your language ability)
My grandmother spent a lot of time in Japan, and she reported that everyone was very accommodating initially, but that over time the expectation developed that after being there for so long she should have learned the correct way to behave.
Yes, but that’s more about manners and being part of a community than language skills. You can speak shit Japanese and still be involved with your local community and be accepted and appreciated, for sure.