[t_akosuke]

Been learning Japanese for...uhmmm...30 years? Not at a consistently intense level, but i started at age 12 with a book my grandpa got me for my birthday when i was a full on anime nerd. I am fluent in a handful of languages so i know i have it in me but, Japanese, oh boy, it's a tough nut to crack. I am conversationally fluent but I'm aware I must sound like a monkey half the time. Japanese is deceitful because the basic grammar rules are pretty simple once you get your head around them, not a lot of tenses or conjugations to learn, not even plurals or gender for the most part. But something about how simple it is makes it actually harder to understand, like the meaning is all these nuanced expressions that take forever to learn, and then of course the completely alien vocabulary, which because of the lack of phonetic variety there's lots and lots of ambiguity, too many similar words. And then there's all the speaking registers as used by different classes of people...