Aye, my Japanese professor went on a tangent during lecture once about the difficult to learn English as a second language compared to learning Japanese.Ephemeral wrote:
i had a discussion once with a japanese student who was learning english - we spoke for a bit about how english grammar sucks, and how english is pretty hard to learn
The number of syllables that can be produced in English is much higher than what can be produced in Japanese, and different combinations of letters are pronounced differently depending on the word. Contrast this to the strict rigidity of the kana "alphabets" and conjugation rules in Japanese, which have a very limited amount of exceptions.
Of course, Kanji is an entirely different beast in and of itself, but even those are relatively systematic compared to English spelling and pronunciation.
I'm so glad that English was my first language.
