[wccrawford]

I'm going to disagree with your friend. The hardest part of Japanese is reading it. You can train all that social stuff through usage and watching a lot of TV. But reading? It's a nightmare.

The simple elementary school stuff isn't hard. But the highschool and college-level stuff? Ugh. Thousands of characters with multiple pronunciations each, sometimes with very tiny differences between them.

[uberstuber]

Heisig's book for recognizing characters worked well for me.

Picking the right pronunciation on the other hand...ends up being totally reliant on if I know the vocab word or not.