[wyager]

I've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English.

The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions.

JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.

[BeretEnjoyer]

> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's

I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

[Tor3]

I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really know why, or if, there's a problem for native English speakers to learn or "get" pitch accent. For speakers of many other European languages Japanese pitch accent is not tricky. You listen, and then you speak. Just as you would listen to English, and repeat it the same way.

Japanese, despite being extremely logical and so beautiful in so many ways, is still hard to learn for me, and of course learning the writing system is not done in the blink of an eye (unlike the Latin-based writing system we use), but pitch accent isn't really the problem here.

[BalinKing]

Is that any more complicated than English stress, though? And regardless, Japanese has a very small number of phonemes (compared to English) and extremely restricted phonotactics.

[wyager]

Yeah, but I don't expect this to be substantively harder than learning most regional accents (could be wrong), and afaik it's also not critical for legibility.