| Slightly different perspective, but while I lived in Japan I did the JLPT as a native English speaker. Among my friends:
Koreans have no problem with Japanese grammar, struggled with writing/reading.
Chinese no problem with reading/writing, struggled with grammar.
English speakers.. struggled with everything but pronunciation hah. As per Chinese characters.
There are a lot of subtle differences:
'Traditional Chinese' is the original.
'Simplified Chinese' was done by the Communist party,
is the standard in Mainland China.
With notable exceptions in Hong Kong and Taiwan For Japanese, there was simplifications in the 50's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai But for the most part they're pretty similar to the Traditional (closer to traditional than simplified) I'm not super familiar with Hanja(korean), but I assume they are the equivalent of 'Traditional' Chinese. Then you also get into subtle drifts in meaning.
My favourite was: 手紙 The characters mean 'hand' and 'paper' respectively. In Japanese, it means 'Letter' In Chinese it means 'Toilet paper' |
This is interesting observation which doesn't go in par with mine. From my experience, native English speakers have really bad pronunciation as the Japanese is full of "soft" sounds like shi, chi, ji. Those are missing in English. For example when you want to say Shibuya, the first two letters should not be pronounced the same as in word "shell." The same "j" in kanji should not be pronounced as in the word "jam." I find this quite common among native English speakers.
On the other hand, I find people of central and east Europe the most gifted. At least WTR pronunciation. They got used to the most of the sounds spoken by Japanese and some more. Some subtlety aside, of course - it's not 100% the same, but close enough.