You really don’t get how cute things are here. If you blow your brains out in Japan, butterflies come out on the exit wound.

Suppose, just for a moment, that an East Asian Linguistics Grad Student (a Prof is fine as well) goes crazy and you just happen to be in the wrong place. He gives you two choices, learn Japanese, and thus Kanji (漢字 lit: chinese characters) as well, or paint a wall with your brain (i.e. gun to the head). I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some of you that decided that giving a steel blowjob might be the easy way out, but I am here to tell you that you are mistaken.

A lot of people think it’s really difficult since there are so many characters to learn (high school students are supposed to know about 1,950 by the time they graduate) but it’s surprisingly not as hard as it’s made out to be. What seems to happen is that many people have a preconceived notion of Japanese being a difficult language even though they don’t have any experience with the language itself. If you actually study the language a bit, you can see that it is actually quite easier than English for a good many reasons.

1. Irregular verbs
English is #3 in the list of living languages with the most irregular verbs, after Italian and German. Try learning a language with a lot of irregular verbs. If you don’t know the language because you were born in a country speaking that language, then you know that it can be a real bitch to learn all of these inconsistent words. How many does Japanese have? About 5. This makes things vastly easier.

Even words are cuter in Japan.

2. No English bullshit
A, the, plurals. Japan as a language has very little use for these. More importantly, you can cut out a bunch of obvious junk that you have to say when speaking English, but can jettison into the grammatical abyss when speaking Japanese.
Example.
What is that? It’s a cat.
何だ？猫だ。(What is? Cat is.)
This is a nice short example, but there are plenty of cases where the unnecessary junk is much more.

3. Where’s the Beef?
Let’s go. How many ways can you say this in English? There’s tons of them, but how about in Japanese? Not really that many. Most of the time, you’re just going to say 行こう (ikou, let’s go) or, more formally, 行きましょ (ikimasho, let’s go). Since most of have English as your first language, you don’t realize that not only do you know the language, but you know the colloquialisms as well. Reducing the number of colloquialisms makes becoming fluent in that language much easier.

Na na. Na na na na na na na.

Katamari Damashii.

4. Kanji can actually make things easier.
The SATs. If you’re from America you probably took this test. For those that did, there were some words on the test that you probably had no idea existed. What advice was given to you to help you deal with such a situation? Look at the sentence/paragraph to find context or learn Latin roots. This is not an easy, nor fun, way to learn new words. If the word is by itself you have little chance of finding out the meaning without consulting Mr. Dictionary. Japanese? It doesn’t work every time, but you can use kanji that you know to understand a word that you don’t.
Example.
殺菌 (sakkin. 殺 kill 菌 germ) Guess what it means. Much easier, isn’t it?

5. Easy to pronounce
Otolaryngology. Say it correctly. Not easy is it? English has a small character base, but it has many more sounds than characters. Japanese has a lower number of sounds, but more characters even if you don’t include kanji. In Japanese, once you learn all of the sounds, you really don’t have too much trouble saying the word, unless if it’s a tongue twister.

I’m not saying that Japanese is a better language, I’m not a snob or a tool. However, Japanese has gotten a bad impression of being an impossible language and/or something that only scary cosplay wearing Otaku people do. You can learn it as long as you try. Chinese on the other hand, I thought about learning it after Japanese but, it seems damn impossible.