silly Wrote:Hahaha, nice. Maybe I'm more easily distracted than you? I can imagine wasting a lot of time playing css when I don't have time to waste! Japanese? Ooo, hard?

The Japanese language really isn't that hard in some ways. It's a very structured language and easy to pronounce in general (speaking a certain dialect can be kinda difficult to learn though).

What's difficult about it foremost is the written system. They use two phonetic alphabets called kana and Chinese characters called kanji. The alphabets aren't hard to learn, just takes some time. The kanji though, ugh. 1000 characters at least to fairly literate; 2000 to be high school literate. Those characters almost always have at least 2-3 different ways of being pronounced as well. So that's a bitch to learn.

Kanji aside, "counters" are difficult to memorize. Since Japanese doesn't use plurals, they refer to things in quantities. The only way I can describe this is like stacking "3 sticks of gum" in English. You don't ever say 3 gums, you say sticks. Sticks would be a counter. They have a ton of these for all sorts of things like flat paper-like objects, cylindrical objects, etc.

Other than that, Japanese isn't too bad. Honestly, I'd find it hard to learn most other languages out there. Japanese pronunciation is so straight forward it makes that part easy.