[foobarian]

I don't know if it's the Indo-European thing or not, but it seems that the writing system is a huge obstacle. In Europe I don't even have to understand a language to be able to read text out loud, just learn a very limited set of pronunciation rules. Even Cyrillic/Greek is a more or less 1-1 phonetic mapping.

[svachalek]

Japanese use 3 different writing systems but 2 of them are simple phonetic systems. The hard one is kanji which uses Chinese characters, there's really nothing you can do about that except memorize memorize memorize.