Who Can Read Japanese?

[marurun]

Not to native English speakers ;)

Languages aren't generally rated on a static difficulty scale. It's more like a relative difficulty scale. To Europeans, Germanic and Latin language speakers, English is unnecessarily complicated but not overly difficult, per se. But to Asian or other language speakers English is hard because it's completely foreign AND hard because it's unnecessarily complicated.

I forget the name of the scale we use here in the US, but there's basically a language rating system, 1 - 4, which rates the challenge of learning a language based on hard it is for western language speakers.

[D.D.D.]

English is supposed to be pretty hard as well....

Yep. It is. Especially if you didn't start to learn a second language by the age of 11~12-ish and that part of the brain is already "old". At least that's what I remember from several research papers I did on language acquisition years ago...
Of all languages I'd say it goes: Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and so on in terms of difficulty of speaking, reading, and writing.

Yeah, I was going to take Chinese in college but Japanese was more compelling as I could play imports sans barriers and etc reasons.
I also worked in an IT company with 99% Vietnamese coworkers for about 3 years and I barely could pick up any of it (and that's hearing it all day long) so I agree that Vietnamese is freakin' hard too.
too tired... turning into lingobabble...