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How easy is Japanese for German speakers?

Going from German to Japanese (日本語) has a composite linguistic distance of 91% (heuristic estimate). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

91% distance FSI Cat IV (Hardest) — ~2,200 hours
Lexical similarity
3%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance
26%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity
13%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match
0%

Latin → Japanese

Genealogical kinship
0%

Indo-European ↔ Japonic

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Other easy languages for German speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from German:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between German and Japanese. No signup.