[haspok]

Are your friends journalists whose job is literally to understand and translate what is happening around them?

There is a guy working for the BBC in Budapest, Hungary, who learned to speak Hungarian quite well in the past ~3 decades. That shows dedication and enthusiasm, because Hungarian is one of the most useless languages to learn (in terms of the number of people you can speak with). Compared to that, learning Japanese even on a basic level is a no brainer... if you happen to live there for a decade!

[vintermann]

The US State Department classifies Japanese as a category IV language, "Super hard languages", languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. They estimate that you need 88 weeks, or 2200 class hours, to reach professional working level in it. That's if you're young, well-educated and very motivated.

By comparison, they estimate Romanian, Swedish and Spanish take 24-30 weeks, or 600-750 class hours.

Ten years is not much to just "pick up" Japanese, unless you're an exceptional linguistic talent.

[astrange]

That's including reading and writing skills, presumably. Spoken Japanese is not a hard language IMO. Reading and writing it without a dictionary on hand is much more difficult.

[nequo]

I can’t help but think that the interaction between you and parent is based on a misunderstanding. By “no brainer,” I think parent didn’t mean that Japanese is easier than Hungarian but that Japanese is much more useful than Hungarian in that you can speak it with around 10 times more people on Earth.