[Ghoyome]

My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.

[Agingcoder]

No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots.

I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written.

Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!

[hsn915]

Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it.

I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading).

Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.