Why Japanese Is So Much Harder Than Portuguese for a French Speaker

Introduction

I currently study two languages at once: Japanese, which I’ve been learning for five years, and Portuguese, which I picked up more recently because half my family is Portuguese. I assumed, going in, that Portuguese would be the easy one — a Romance language close to French — while Japanese would remain the long, difficult project it’s always been. That assumption turned out to be mostly right, but studying both simultaneously revealed something more interesting than just “one is harder than the other”: the two languages break in genuinely different places, and understanding why has changed how I approach each of them.

Reason One: Sentence Structure

French and English both follow an SVO structure — subject, verb, object. “I eat an apple.” “Je mange une pomme.” Japanese follows SOV — subject, object, verb. The same sentence becomes, roughly, “I an apple eat.”

On its own, that example doesn’t sound too disruptive. The real difficulty shows up once you realize this inversion applies to entire sentences, not just simple ones. I notice this constantly now that my Japanese comprehension has improved enough to catch discrepancies between spoken dialogue and French subtitles in anime: a character delivering a long sentence in Japanese starts with information that would come at the end of the equivalent French sentence, because the verb — which usually anchors the meaning — comes last. The order of information is essentially reversed. This is also exactly why machine translation services tend to be noticeably less reliable for Japanese than for a language like Spanish — even when the words are all correctly translated, a Japanese native speaker will often say the result feels technically comprehensible but unnatural or oddly formal.

Portuguese has none of this friction. Its sentence structure mirrors French closely enough that you’re rarely fighting the language’s basic shape — you’re mostly just swapping vocabulary into a structure your brain already knows.

Reason Two: No Recognizable Vocabulary

The second major difference is more fundamental: Portuguese vocabulary constantly resembles French. Even before studying it seriously, I could already guess a meaningful chunk of a Portuguese sentence just from word resemblance. Japanese offers essentially none of this. Every word sounds unfamiliar, with no anchor point in anything I already know.

This matters more than it might seem, because memory works through association — new information sticks far more easily when it connects to something already stored in your brain. That’s exactly why mnemonic techniques (inventing a small, vivid story to link a new word to something familiar) are so useful for Japanese specifically: there’s no natural anchor, so you have to manufacture one deliberately. Portuguese rarely needs this kind of scaffolding, because the anchor — a similar-sounding or similar-looking French word — is usually already there.

There is, interestingly, a partial compensation on the Japanese side: once you’ve learned the base characters (kanji), the language becomes something closer to a puzzle. Combine the character for “mountain” with the character for “fire,” and you get a new word: volcano. Compare that to French, where knowing “montagne” and “feu” gives you no way to guess “volcan” — you simply have to know it. So while Japanese vocabulary offers no initial recognition, its writing system does offer a compounding logic that, once unlocked, actually makes some vocabulary acquisition more predictable than in French.

The Hidden Trap in “Easy” Languages

Here’s the part I didn’t expect going in: Japanese’s difficulty, while exhausting, is at least honest about itself. You either understand a sentence or you don’t — there’s no comfortable middle ground where you can coast on partial recognition, because nothing looks familiar enough to fake it.

Portuguese’s similarity to French turned out to create a subtler problem. When I started doing heavy immersion in Portuguese, I found I could follow along fairly well almost immediately — understanding the general gist of native content even as a near-beginner. That felt like a huge advantage at first. But it created a specific illusion: understanding the general idea of a sentence isn’t the same as actually knowing how to construct it yourself, and the ease of passive comprehension let me quietly skip past that gap for weeks without noticing.

This showed up directly in speaking. Despite feeling like I understood Portuguese reasonably well, I discovered — talking with a native speaker for practice — that I genuinely didn’t know some fairly basic sentence structures. French uses prepositions after certain verbs in specific, sometimes arbitrary ways: “je pense à quelque chose” (I think about something), where “je pense de quelque chose” would simply be wrong. I had no idea what the Portuguese equivalent required, because passive listening comprehension never forced me to confront that gap directly — I was understanding just well enough to never notice what I didn’t actually know.

Why This Matters for Your Own Learning

The lesson here isn’t really about Japanese or Portuguese specifically — it’s about recognizing which trap applies to whatever language you’re learning relative to your own.

If your target language is very different from your native one, immersion will be honest with you by default: comprehension gaps are impossible to miss, because nothing can be faked through resemblance. The discomfort itself is doing useful work — it’s forcing you to build real, active knowledge rather than passive recognition.

If your target language is closely related to your own — French learners coming from Spanish or Italian, for instance — be specifically wary of the illusion of understanding. Passive immersion alone can let you feel like you’re progressing while quietly avoiding the actual structural knowledge — verb conjugations, correct prepositions, sentence construction — that speaking actually requires. In this case, it’s worth deliberately adding theory back in: practicing conjugation exercises, or preparing what you actually want to say before a real conversation, rather than trusting comprehension alone to carry you toward speaking ability.

Conclusion

Distant languages and closely related ones fail you in opposite ways. A language wildly different from your own is exhausting but rarely deceptive — you know exactly where the gaps are. A language close to your own can quietly let you overestimate your ability, because partial understanding feels like real understanding until you actually try to produce the language yourself. Knowing which trap you’re in changes what kind of practice you need: more raw immersion for the distant language, and more deliberate, structural attention for the close one.