Question:
Answer:
I guess the kanji, but honestly... it's just the language in general. As someone that actually studied ethnolinguistics albeit not too intensely, the Japanese language has to be among the most horrifically constructed and inefficient languages in the planet. I say this with love for the language. In fact, I'm up to 1200 Kanji as of today (reading/writing the whole shazam) and am currently reading a Murakami essay in Japanese.
It's a beautiful language both sonorously and visually, but it's limitations are apparent when even native Japanese people have to clarify with each other while talking about what they just talked about. The sounds that can be produced are extremely limited thus leading to an insane amount of homonyms which is precisely why Chinese characters are considered necessary. The usage of grammatical points such as commas, colons, and periods should be used more aggressively as reading Japanese itself is physically straining to the eye with what would seem to an English speaker as a continuation of run-on sentences.
It's a shame honestly. I recall a couple of decades back, the Japanese literati made a serious push to abolish Chinese but found that the Japanese language wasn't self-sufficient enough as a means of communication without Chinese characters.
Also, it's purely horizontal. It doesn't have true "vowels," it's basically just sounds associated with each Chinese character with many permutations depending on its adjacent Chinese characters and depending on what position it is (front, rear, etc...)
I'm fluent in English, Korean, Spanish, and speak a bit of French, and my survival Japanese is quite decent if my 5 months in Japan of talking to random Japanese strangers and uh... not dying is any indication. My success with language acquisition has largely been to just memorize the living crap out of the most common used vocabularies of a language (usually about 5,000 to 7,000 words), then quickly master basic grammar points, then proceed straightforward to simple children's books and inquiring about unknown grammar and vocab. In fact, I've asked quite a bit of grammar questions right here in the Japan forums. With Japanese, this becomes impossible due to the sheer amount of Kanji you have to memorize. Even when you know how to write the Kanji and know the numerous and disconsonant meanings of the Kanji, it still doesn't mean you can read it.
Honestly, I could have probably learned 3 languages in the time I've spent studying and will have to continue to study for Japanese. Speaking isn't difficult especially since the Japanese grammar is almost 90 percent the same as Korean, it's just the structure of the language itself.
I'm starting to get better exponentially lately though. It's a very tough learning curve that's for sure.
