Sorry, what i meant was comparing english to japanese directly. It was poor wording on my part. What i meant to say was for a non language learner to just start learning Japanese will seem very difficult, but if you compare learning japanese with learning, say, french, it may not seem as bad if you remove the writing systems and use only romanji.

I am an english native speaker from a Hispanic family, and i find Spanish to be quite difficult. I learned conversational japanese (and hiragana and katakana) while i was young. Not particularly advanced, mind you, but conversational and low level. I found, personally, japanese to be much easier to pick up than Spanish. I wasn’t particularly into watching anime, either. I understand this portion is anecdotal, but that was my experience.

Eventually, i learned italian (to approximately b-1) level, and both Spanish and German to a-2 so far (i may be over estimating my Spanish, to be honest). Japanese is nowhere near as difficult as learning German. German grammar is extremely tricky, and I’ve found that many Germans don’t really enjoy speaking it because of the difficulty (at least this is what they tell me). This is also my personal experience, which impacts how i feel about the languages but doesn’t outright define their difficulty.

My point with the three genders was in memorizing all the articles that don’t exist in English or Japanese. There’s no grammatical gender. I’m glad it was easy for you to pick up, but that is more difficult for English speakers than people want to admit, especially when there is no rule for how the genders are assigned. In italian and Spanish there are some rules, but in German, I need to literally memorize every German word, with article, and then memorize how to conjugate nominative, accusative, dative … This simply doesn’t exist in Japanese.

Japanese is level 4 but only with the written form included, and it’s a very simple explanation: it’s considered a level 4 when the new 3 written forms are included. If you remove those written forms, it’s only a level 2 language, which is still considerably difficult to be fair.

To address a few of your points, there are no new sounds to master in Japanese that don’t already exist in English, so I’m not sure what you mean there and i would love for you to explain it to me.

Also, for the written forms, hiragana and katakana are actually somewhat easy to learn, so I’m not sure why you bring those up and not kanji. You need to know more than 2,000 kanji to be considered literate. This is why Japanese is considered difficult, and not anything else. You can’t even get n5 certified without knowing some kanji.

Suggesting one needs to have already absorbed japanese culture to consider it a level 3 is… an inaccurate statement. I think that’s missing the mark on what the difficulty rankings are trying to assess. Any language will be easier if you absorb its content, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the difficulty of it.

Oh interesting that’s one of my least favorite parts of duolingo

There’s a free app called scripts I’ve been using to learn stroke order. It’s just okay but they smash them at you with much more repetition

It’s persistence too. The language exchange is great to hear, that’s huge.

I’m much better now from daily chats with my Japanese friends. That’s really what was missing from the many, many, many years I spent before imo. I would study flash cards and eventually Anki decks once that was a thing, I would have practice conversations here and there with other weebs or in class during the brief period I had that. But for the most part I just read manga, which isn’t really all that challenging (usually), and I would listen to anime while reading subtitles. It was so passive

But now it’s the study daily instead of when I feel like it. It’s chatting every night with my friends and having them be like oh no, it’s actually もう一つの, not もう一つ. Or it’s “so-reh” or whatever I’m saying wrong. The constant feedback is essential

They say that immersion is one of the best ways to pick up a new language.

If it was everywhere all of the time, and you took advantage of things like community language learning events and language learning apps, you could become fluent in a matter of months.

After all, most people only need like a thousand to two thousand words to get by, So yeah, well, you may not be languidly discussing Proust during a bachanal with your neighbors by the end of the season, you should be able to identify stores and food items and discuss the weather and minor events.