Can I really learn Japanese in the course of a summer?

Japanese is spoken primarily in Japan by some 128 million people. The language of Eastern Asia is also the national language of the country and is called Nihongo. Japanese is a Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuanese) language and its final derivation is unclear. The Japonic Language Family was clubbed with the following language families, Ainu, Austroasiatic, Korean and Altaic, but neither of these proposals gained broad consensus.

It takes multiple months if not years for professionals to master this language completely. Even after that, they believe that they could utilise a lot of practice to completely master this language. Apart from English native speakers or any other language native speakers, Japanese native speakers themselves find this language extremely difficult to get a hang of. 

This is due to the many difficulties that accompany it. To begin with, Japanese doesn’t have a single alphabet pattern, instead, it has three in total. Firstly, you have Katakana, then Hiragana and finally, Kanji. Kanji is considered to be the toughest alphabet system in the world. In fact, many Japanese native speakers themselves fail to master this alphabet system. 

Apart from that almost none of the vocabulary utilised in the Japanese language coincides with any other language in the world. Therefore, finding similarities between your language and Japanese is going to be extremely rare. Furthermore, the grammar used has its own specific rules, this might not come to you as a surprise as most languages have their own grammar rules. Finally, the sentence formation is also very different from what you might be used to. 

Considering all these factors, I personally believe, it is going to be very difficult and almost impossible to learn Japanese in the course of a single summer as this summer would only span out for two months. There is a possibility of you just understanding the very basics but not being thorough with the basics. You might start identifying a single alphabet or two or maybe you start recognising and understanding a very specific word. 

But you definitely will not be able to speak a sentence let alone frame it. You are definitely going to need subtitles when you watch any Japanese show or anime, you definitely are going to need English lyrics if you’re listening to Japanese music and you’re most definitely going to need to ask a translator to help you out in case you end up in a conversation with a Japanese native speaker. You simply cannot master the language of Japanese in the course of a single month.

Japanese does not have an explainable genealogical relation with Chinese, although it uses Chinese characters- Kanji, in their written form, making use of the extensive borrowed vocabulary from the Chinese language. Japanese extensively uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts in the Japanese writing system, called the Hiragana and Katakana; however, it also uses Latin script but in a very limited way for imported acronyms etc. The numeral system mainly uses Arabic numerals and Chinese traditional numerals.