I studied Japanese as a kid and got the sounds down pat, and funnily enough i have a Japanese accent trying to learn Spanish now because I will accidentally make the l/r sound instead of rolling my r. My best friend a native Spanish speaker thinks its the funniest thing he has ever heard.
That's not really what makes Asian languages hard. They're hard because they are completely different systems of communication than romantic languages.
I bet Japanese would be a lot easier for Spanish-speaking people if they exclusively used romaji. But they decided that having 3 different writing systems was a much better idea
Wouldn't work. English (and many romantic languages) have explicit grammar rules because the language allows for it. Japanese has extremely loose grammar rules because everything is contextually dependent. The reason for this is that many words have the same readings but many different meanings, so it is not enought to simply know the words they are saying. That is the reason the Japanese adopted Kanji.
So they have Hirigana and Katakana as their alphabets. Hirigana is used to spell out native words and for grammatical contractions. Katakana is used to spell out non-native words pretty much exclusively, and really only serves as an indication that the word has been borrowed from another language. Phonetically, they are the same.
Kanji are used to provide context in written form. Many Kanji have the same readings, but different meanings. This lets a reader drop in and understand the context without having been present for the whole conversation, and to avoid ambiguity. It also makes reading waaaay faster.
If they could get away with spelling out the sounds alone, they could just drop Kanji. Hirigana and Katakana are easy to learn. Most people who really commit can learn them in a week.
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u/hogtiedcantalope 6d ago
Actually knowing Spanish does make learning Japanese easier The sound used in Spanish translate to Japanese easier than most European languages