[tinco]

You say that sarcastically, but those are all easy things you can master in a week, and they are the sort of thing you might find in the English language or even a dialect. It doesn't compare to learning Chinese or Arabic it seems to me.

Just the fact that you can write out romanji and get reasonably understandable Japanese makes it easier than a significant amount of languages out there.

In my opinion the only thing that makes Japanese truly hard is that they decided for some insane reason to borrow the Chinese writing system, which is the most insane writing system in the world, for half (why half!?) of their writing.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

A guess as a beginning Japanese learner: Japanese has a lot of homophones because it has so few syllables. It is also almost always written without spaces. Kanji is actually pretty helpful in reading because it provides semantic meaning that disambiguates homophones as well being more terse and breaking up the writing along grammatical boundaries.

I'm approaching this from the angle of wanting to understand video-game Japanese, and when I am trying to parse some 8-bit era all-katakana chunk of text I find myself wishing it included kanji even though I can only recognize a few dozen just so the grammar is more clear.