Item — HN Reader

In Tokyo it is possible to get a job as a software developer without speaking Japanese. After living here a couple years someone decides they like life here, but want to run their own business. Maybe they want to run a SaaS or something that targets a global audience. For visa purposes, they need a Japanese company.

By this time they’ve maybe picked up up some basic Japanese but aren’t fluent. Becoming fluent in a language is quite challenging, especially if you’re working full time in an English language environment. Even without fluency, it’s possible to enjoy life here.

1 comments

Especially in Japan. I don't think it's really possible for a native English speaker to ever become 100 percent proficient in Japanese.

What makes you think that? Japanese is just a normal language. You have to study vocabulary and grammar and interact enough with native speakers to learn expressions. The writing system and the lack of cognates makes it harder for an English speaker than, say, Swedish, but there is no reason to believe that you can't ever reach full professional proficiency.

The only category V language for English speakers, that also has an asterisk:

https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang...

> Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers

> Arabic

> Cantonese (Chinese)

> Mandarin (Chinese)

> [asterisk] Japanese

> Korean

> [asterisk] Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category

Why is that? Except for Kanji, Japanese doesn't look like a difficult language because it doesn't have genders and inflections.

Japanese does have inflections. Specifically, verbs are conjugated: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Japanese_verbs#Conju...

You are right, I meant cases [1] , like those that are there in German.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

The Wikipedia article you linked has a section on cases in Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Japanese