I can't agree more. I made some progress on Japanese only to find that when I spoke it was completely incomprehensible to a native speaker. I think speech/pronunciation correction is still an unsolved problem.
No, Japanese phonology and therefore pronunciation (what the grand parent post is complaining about) is one of the easiest out there. There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant. I don't understand how pronunciation could be remotely a problem with Japanese.
There are also some other easy things like grammar (very few rules, that are quite consistent and composable) and some basic sentence pattern (heck you can make full sentences, sometimes conversations, with a single word [the predicative adjectives]).
> There are very few consonants, only 5 vowels, not tone and accent is irrelevant.
Except that l/r is pronounced differently than most English speakers, the vowels aren't always pronounced yet take up time ("Nan desu ka" is almost always pronounced like "Nan dess ka", for example), and syllable accent is tone rather than volume for emphasis.
You say that sarcastically, but those are all easy things you can master in a week, and they are the sort of thing you might find in the English language or even a dialect. It doesn't compare to learning Chinese or Arabic it seems to me.
Just the fact that you can write out romanji and get reasonably understandable Japanese makes it easier than a significant amount of languages out there.
In my opinion the only thing that makes Japanese truly hard is that they decided for some insane reason to borrow the Chinese writing system, which is the most insane writing system in the world, for half (why half!?) of their writing.
A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well being more terse and breaking up the writing along grammatical boundaries.
I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.
Imagine thinking learning ONE phoneme is a hard task... Please never have a look at Arabic or you'll have a stroke.
Moreover [ɾ] can be replaced by [l] perfectly fine and the vowel devoicing is not something you need to do anyway (it's not even occurring in all dialects). So even searching really hard for "difficulties" you can't find even one thing that is remotely difficult which just proves my point.
from Wikipedia: "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional in having predominantly SVO order instead of V2, although there are vestiges of the V2 phenomenon."
Romance languages like French and Spanish use SVO so I think it's correct to say English is like them.
An example given by wiki of German sentence structure translated directly to English:
"Before school played the children in the park soccer."
The wording you quote, "Of the Germanic family, English is exceptional", implies English is a Germanic language. One that borrows heavily from Latin, but still, a Germanic language.
Also from wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
"English is a Germanic language, with a grammar and a core vocabulary inherited from Proto-Germanic. However, a significant portion of the English vocabulary comes from Romance and Latinate sources."
English borrows from both quite heavily (for historical reasons listed there), to where I don't know that classifying it makes a lot of sense, but having dabbled with both, just from a language learning perspective, I'd say German definitely feels closer. Some simple counterexamples -
"What is that?" - "Was ist das?" vs "Que es eso". Same grammatic structure, but obviously very similiar words between German and English. Not so much Spanish. The Latin is "quid est".
"I see him" - "Ich sehe ihn" vs "Lo veo". English and German are very similar in both grammar and word; Spanish is very different from both, putting the direct object before the verb as it does, and not requiring the subject (yo). The Latin is "i videre eum".
I'm familiar with V2 and how English doesn't exhibit it. Look at the following weird deviations from how you'd say things in English
* I am hungry
* Ich bin hungrig
* It is raining today
* Es regnet heute
* Where is your house?
* Wo ist dein Haus?
It turns out that Germanic V2 is SVO in the case of simple declarative sentences! But what about other kinds of ordering, below the full sentence level?
Look at this, about the ordering of attributive adjectives and nouns in Spanish vs. German:
* un hombre alto
* una chica muy bonita
* ein großer mensch
* eine sehr schönes Mädchen
Like German, English places attributive adjectives before the nouns they modify.
Consider the possibility of eliding pronouns:
* Yo tengo hambre
* Tengo hambre
both are fine in Spanish.
* I am hungry
* Am hungry
Dropping the pronoun in English isn't ok in English, unless you're going to produce a fairly contrived context - like a text message, etc. It's not normal speech. In case you're curious, you can't drop the pronoun in German, either.
Language has lots of tiny facts that fit together in interesting ways.V
I've had some success with talking to the Apple Translate app (formulating my own sentences) while learning Arabic using Duolingo. Arabic people could actually understand my simple, mostly nonsense sentences
I took foreign language courses in high school and college. I couldn't actually communicate until moving to the country where they spoke it and living there for six months. Then I had to go back home :(
