Is Japanese a hard language to learn?

Question:

I definitely am going to visit Japan some day. I love the culture & food so I was wondering how hard it is to learn Japanese?

Your opinions & personal experiences are greatly appreciated.

Answer:

I don't think it's as hard as others and certainly not as hard as English. The grammatical patterns are fairly simple and very regular with relatively few exceptions compared to English which has ten exceptions for every rule (especially for pronunciation). There are only five vowel sounds that only have one pronunciation each. If you can remember those five sounds you should be able to pronounce practically anything.

The daunting part of Japanese is, of course, their written language. 2000 kanjis to learn to be at Jr High level. And 101 simple phonetic characters.

There is also the issue of their informal/semi-formal/polite speech levels which adds completely new dimensions to the language. Most classes concentrate on semi-formal which will keep you from getting beat up or laughed at.

There's no having to remember masculine/feminine words like French or Spanish

There's no five-levels of tones that completely change words like Chinese. There are simple intonation changes but it should not keep you from being understood through the context of your conversation no matter how bad you may be.

There's no inflected vowel sounds as there are in so many European languages.

Things like Western sports (baseball, football, soccer, basketball, etc.), computer technology, and other areas that aren't traditionally of Japanese origin in the last century or so, borrow heavily from English and other languages so much that you may already know the vocabulary/terminology for a lot of things and don't even know it.

While certainly not easy, it gets my vote for easier.