You’re just repeating a lot of what you already said, so I’m not actually going to respond to all of it. What I’m trying to explain is that Japan is considered a level 4 language assuming you need to also learn 3 writing systems. If you remove the writing systems, it’s much easier, because it is.

Additionally, I’ve said multiple times that I’m discussing conversational japanese, not complete mastery.

Really, I’m just going to share links that discuss the difficulty without writing.

I have absolutely no idea where you’re getting the idea that japanese is so deep and complex that it’s a top difficulty language to speak. It’s exclusively the writing style that makes it so hard. Having lived there myself (and in Germany, attempting to speak German) i feel pretty confident in this.

One of many quotes you can find from sources that actually discuss the language and why it’s ranked a certain way:

“Even experts agree that spoken Japanese is not particularly difficult to learn. The sounds of the language are limited (only five vowels and thirteen consonants) and grammatically it is quite regular, without case declensions or other complex issues that are found in languages like Russian, or even German.”

https://ai.glossika.com/blog/is-japanese-really-that-hard

https://workinjapan.today/study/how-difficult-is-learning-japanese/

https://90dayjapanese.com/is-japanese-hard-to-learn/

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.

Thanks for the reply. I’m unsure why the honorifics get brought up in discussion of difficulty. Many non English languages have at minimum 2 of forms as well as 2 genders (some have more). I understand japanese has a lot of honorific titles and a few forms, but it’s not that difficult, for 90-95% of your interactions you can just use two really (and some of the titles exist in english as well, Mr, Mrs., Ms., Miss, Master, Dr., Lord, add an Esq. at the end for some, etc.). For me personally, I would put this in the same category as not understanding how to properly use romance language diminutives (and in many language courses these aren’t really taught until later, as far as I’m aware).

The numbers are fine? I’ve never heard this critique. I might be misunderstanding the point on this one. Other languages have some form of number conjugation as well so my apologies for not getting this

Grammar as compared to what language? Are we comparing Japanese to English only? I said it’s a level 2 not a level 1, but romance language grammar can be somewhat confusing for English speakers as well.

I was young when I learned conversational Japanese and found it surprisingly straightforward as an English native speaker. Additionally, there are no tones (unlike for example Chinese), and all the spoken sounds exist in English, so it’s not too hard for an English speaker to correctly pronounce words with practice (so I completely agree with you here).

Now I’m studying German, which is supposed to be much easier by comparison, and there are 3 word genders and literally dozens of direct and indirect pronouns. It’s extremely difficult to comprehend and recall mid conversation (or even at all). Then, depending on a lot of factors, the grammar also changes. That, plus numbers are reversed (9 and 20 as opposed to 29, and don’t get me started on French numbers). Also, there are multiple sounds that don’t even exist in english.

Still, I will reiterate, I’m suggesting Japanese is more of a level 2 language, but I assure you the majority of difficulty comes from the written form.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declension

Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2. It’s the written form (3 separate forms) that’s difficult, bringing it to a level 4. Speaking is quite easy compared to other languages.