[creshal]

> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes."

That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go where.

Of course, articulating yourself correctly is the bigger (or more long-term) challenge when learning a second language, but in the case of Japanese you have a higher up-front learning curve than with most other languages.

[panglott]

Yes, the grammar of Japanese has a very simple internal logic and is easy to learn, although quite different from European languages.

The problem is all the words, and there are no cognates.

[tragomaskhalos]

Exactly. The claim that Japanese grammar is very difficult seems bizarre to me because the morphology is so regular, and I don't subscribe to the idea that flexibility and omission of words makes it harder either, more that you just have to attune yourself to it. No, the elephants in the room are (a) the vocab and (b) Kanji.

[shawnps]

That's a good point. I can imagine it might be difficult for someone new to Japanese to understand who is the subject of the sentence, when pronouns are dropped so frequently.

[stordoff]

It's part of the language I enjoy (I find myself dropping pronouns, usually "I", in written English anyway, so it feels oddly natural), but dropping "watashi wa"/"anata wa" even in something as simple as "I am <name>"/"You are <name>" (both can be said as "<name> desu"> definitely makes it more difficult to get started. I've found it to be more or less a non-issue once I got used to picking up on the context clues, but there's no easy/quick way to get there other than listening to a lot of the language.