How hard is it to learn Japanese to a native English speaker?

Question:

Answer:

Actually, it depends on what you mean by "to learn".

If you mean to achieve native-speaker level proficiency, it is incredibly difficult. If you mean to learn enough to get by on your own, its not too bad. If you mean learning enough to travel, its pretty easy.

Japanese has fewer true cognates than latin or germanic languages have. While they use a lot of katakana-ized English words, they also are often not mutually comprehensible. (For example "yuumoa" in Japanese, is supposed to be "hummor" in English but you would never catch that.) Because of the lack of cognates and differences in grammar, not to mention the writing system, its pretty hard to get to a high level of proficiency. However, if you want to be able to have basic conversations and are willing to put some time in, you can get to an intermediate level of speaking without much trouble.