Why the kanji are so hard to read

[RCBH928]

Any one who thinks English is difficult I have to tell him , you are 100% wrong.
I think I can comfortably say English is the easiest language to learn, there are no grammar rules really, He ran, She ran , We all ran...its all ran. In other languages it changes according to number(1, 2, 3 or more ) and their gender. Talking about 2 females is different from talking about 2 males .
Please no one argues that grammar exists in English, I knew it does , its just the easiest of all languages.

Where it gets most people in English is spelling, I am not sure who wrote the English spelling rules but he must have been high. You really can't tell how to spell a word, I mean based on what rules in CHIcago its (SHI) and in CHIcken its(well, CHI). For me it really gets weird when there is British spelling and an American spelling, center and centre ?! Did someone just say we must be different, or did someone misspelled it and people followed along? But we all can say thank god for spelling correction software.

As for universal language,I am sorry to say its English. Trust me , every where they speak this language. I do not have anything against English, but people around the world are being "westernized" by English. Some people here do not know the native language, but know English, although native language here is the daily newspaper, tv, music,official documents,books, spoken and more language, it isn't like a tribal dying language.
You do not have to believe, watch this,:

This is Jeddah, Saudia Arabia. Yes the same guys on camels bombing WTC. Can you believe it?
(btw, Jeddah is closest city to Mecca, actually you have to land in Jeddah airport to get to Mecca by car)

Back to the main topic, some one in this forum posted a website about how difficult it was to learn Japanese, the piece of text was pretty funny with the author making comments like holocaust literally means "To learn Japanese".
Best advice I can say is, not learn the language but accept it. Do not think logically about it.
If they tell you 計画 = schedule , then it means schedule .
The best way to learn a language is to accept it as it is, and get used to it. It is not like math where 1+1=2 then 2-1=1 , it is what it is.
Get used to it, and when ever you see that symbol over and over and over again you will know it is schedule and you will remember the pronunciation.

Japanese is one of those languages that you are lucky if you are born with it , otherwise its really difficult to learn you can't just pick it up.

My main problem with Japanese/Chinese is that you can't tell the characters apart, there are too many lines involved in a small character(letter?) to tell which one it is?
I mean look at this one: 講 or this 橋.

My final advice is to live the language, watch tv, read books, talk to native speakers, play games like its your own language. That way you build vocabulary and correct pronunciation .
Its a life long process, I have been studying and dealing with English for the past 25 years(my age) on daily basis yet a lot consider me an intermediate speaker of the language .

last but not least can any one tell me what those two signs mean:
の and 日,
I don't speak Japanese and never learned it, yet I can still identify those two because I see them a lot

[Anayo]

の and 日

の is a hiragana and is pronounced "no." It means "of the".

日 is a kanji and means "day." It's got half a dozen different pronunciations but all by itself it's "nichi."

[MrPopo]

Where it gets most people in English is spelling, I am not sure who wrote the English spelling rules but he must have been high.

No, it's just that English is about a third German, a third French, and a third other. The common words all have very straightforward spelling, as they're from German. The more interesting words have strange rules as they come from the French.

For me it really gets weird when there is British spelling and an American spelling, center and centre ?! Did someone just say we must be different, or did someone misspelled it and people followed along? But we all can say thank god for spelling correction software.

This is the phenomena of a language being split by territorial borders and how it evolves. The most famous is the color/colour split, which you can make a case for the British version (ou). However, I think the Brits lose all credibility when they spell theater as "theatre".

[Niode]

Theatre is a french word. Technically you lot writing it as Theater is butchering it.

[jfrost]

Portuguese from Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese also have different spellings. Never thought this was a big deal, although the government is trying to unify the grammars (and failing miserably, thankfully).

Now, for the differences in English, I still think it's bizarre reading "cheque" instead of "check".

[Inazuma]

I am a native English speaker who later became fluent in Japanese. Difficult to read kanji aside, English is a much harder language in my opinion.

[MrPopo]

Theatre is a french word. Technically you lot writing it as Theater is butchering it.

I call it making the language a bit saner.

And jfrost, if you think cheque is some weird spelling then you'll love queue. Pronounced just like cue.

[Niode]

But how do you differentiate between a check for banking (IE a cheque) and a check as in to have a look?

Do you lot have the same word for a cue as in pool cue and cue for a queue? That seems retarded to me. If you're going to dumb the English language down that much then you might as well go the whole hog and just change all 'sh' sounding 'ch' words to just sh, IE shicane or Shicago as well, among other atrocities.

[Limewater]

But how do you differentiate between a check for banking (IE a cheque) and a check as in to have a look?

The same way you tell log (a piece of a tree) from log (a record of something) from log (as in "to log in to my acount"), context!

Do you lot have the same word for a cue as in pool cue and cue for a queue?

No, we do spell it queue over here. However, we don't use the word that often.

[crux]

Theatre is a french word. Technically you lot writing it as Theater is butchering it.

I call it making the language a bit saner.

It's not sensible word in English anyway. Two adjacent vowels usually form a common sound, where as the ea in "theatre" is a diaeresis (common in French, called tréma). Considering that, it just makes more sense to spell it like the French (théâtre). May as well go full blown.