[presentation]

Yeah, I actually find a lot of the grammatical rules to be pretty straightforward and generally there aren’t many weird exceptions. Distinguishing sounds is pretty easy too, unlike Mandarin for example. The levels of formality are tricky at first but you quickly adapt to it, and they also follow well defined rules. A lot of the odd pronunciations of words like you mention are generally things you can just memorize blindly. Cultural aspects and sensitivity can be very tough, but I think that’s true for any foreign culture. Time intensive? Sure, but most difficult? I don’t think so, but I think that depends on what you mean by difficult and what your goal is. If your goal is to masquerade as a pseudo-native speaker and be fully literate, then yeah, I could see it. But if it’s just to be conversant, it’s not that bad.

[rtpg]

echoing this, getting to a "everyday discussions doable" level for the spoken language is a relatively quick affair. There are very few sounds in the language, and the hardest thing for native-english speakers is perhaps the double-vowel timing and like trying to decipher loan words/overwrite the "original pronunciation"

The writing system is hard, but learning it helps complement your vocabulary in the same way that learning greek and latin prefixes/suffixes expands your english vocabulary.

Not even to get into the fact that, as a high context language, you can get away with extremely simple sentences and rely on context way more than in other languages.