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This is a couple of questions in one really. I received this snippet from a
new penpal and I wasn't sure what some of it meant:

> 日本語になりにくいです。

Online translations (I know, rarely reliable...) yields:

> "It is hard to become in Japanese.".

I'm just starting out but have read about "ni naru" meaning "to become",
however I've not seen "ni nari" before.

I find it hard to separate all-hiragana words at the moment so I'm not 100%
sure if the phrase is split up as "Nihongo ni nari nikui desu."

* * *

Also, within the message are the following symbols:

。。。。。。。。

※`<some text>`※

→ ？？？

Are these Japanese-specific in any way...?
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2017-09-10T10:57:05.327
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question
grammar translation meaning
First Message From Japanese PenPal Has Slightly Confused Me
なりにくい is of the form

> 連用形 _ren'yōkei_ + にくい

meaning "difficult to [verb]" or "hard to [verb]".

なる is "to become" or "to change into" (where "change" here is intransitive)
and なり is its _ren'yōkei_ (" _masu_ -form"). So

> 日本語になりにくい = _lit._ difficult to change into Japanese

Only you know the context, but maybe you asked your pen pal how to translate
"cow tipping" into Japanese, and he or she tried to tell you "this phrase
doesn't easily translate to Japanese".

You can remember this construction also for やすい, which works exactly the same
but means the opposite of にくい, i.e. "easy to" or "likely to".
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2017-09-10T11:49:29.080
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answer