Hello I will be starting my first semester of college next year and I want to take Japanese. how hard is elementary Japanese 1 in college? Is it as hard as everyone says it is? I have a real love for foreign languages but I have only been exposed to Spanish and Hebrew so far.
Depends- intro college language courses will be very fast paced, much faster than high school. I have a friend who is currently taking 1st semseter Japanese at our college, and he seems to be doing alright, though I know he studies pretty hard for that class. If it’s relevant to you, he’s bilingual in English and Spanish.
As someone who can read, write, speak Chinese, I would say it’s pretty hard for people for shift from alphabet languages to symbolic languages, as well as to a grammatical structure that developed differently from a lot of Western languages. Japanese gets a bit harder than that since they have 3 different written systems.
Anyways, I wouldn’t let the difficulty scare you away! Languages are really fun and it’s hard to get chances to learn new ones after college. If you want to learn it, go for it!