Having studied French, German, and Japanese (as a native English speaker), I would say it's the easiest of the three to learn to *speak* and *listen to* (it has only five distinct vowel sounds and its consonants are spread out in a way that's easier to pick up), but due to kanji is a much greater effort to learn to *read* and *write* at a level past the basics.
Grammar is about the same between all three - stuff like prepositions/particles, that's always going to be different in ways that feel weird in a new language, and every language has quirks there that you adapt to over time.
Renshuu's strength is really in helping to tackle that harder part of vocab and kanji that makes Japanese feel less approachable.
People who study these things say that Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn, although how hard or easy a language is may have more to do with how different it is from your native language than any inherent difficulty.
I think It depends on your native language. Japanese is likely a difficult language for native English speakers as it differs so much from English in so many ways, including pronunciation, writing systems, and grammar. But speakers of languages with closer similarities to Japanese, such as Chinese or Korean, may find it easier to pick up Japanese.
I know, but compared to English, Chinese and Korean are similar to Japanese in some aspects (e.g., Chinese in writing systems and Korean in word order and certain grammar points).
My point is that, compared to English speakers, learning kanji is at least less daunting for Chinese speakers, and the structure of Japanese sentences is easier for Korean speakers to adapt to.
It varies from person to person, it all kind of depends on your goals to learn the language and what you hope to achieve.
For me it's learning for fun, and when I visit japan I'd like to know a bit of the language to "immerse" myself a little more and perhaps form connections.
And beeing able to read and maybe write will help, though i focus way more on reading/pronunciation than i do on writing.
So set a goal, and see if its the language for you.
I think if your native language only use a single alphabet, you might have a tough time getting used to two although most of the times Hiragana is the one you'd see more often.
After that, then the next difficulty would be on how you approach to learn Kanji (in which, Renshuu is extremely helpful, it has been the best app I've found to learn Kanji - also good for Hiragana and Katakana, but Renshuu really goes beyond what you'd expect, other apps I've tried has been mostly just practice gratification (reviewing) of what I've learnt on Renshuu - on which Renshuu also shines at for being so flexible on how you want to learn/review, check out the FAQ (white button with a blue character representing the question mark "?")), at least that's how I feel it's been to me.
When it comes to everything else it is mostly the same as learning any other language.
I find it fairly easy, I feel the biggest turn off is the 3 alphabets. As any language it's just a lot of memorizing.
I tried Finnish one and decided that it was evil, Japanese is a lot easier in comparison to me.
I might be wrong but as far as I know, Kanji isn't considered an alphabet, so it'd be two alphabets.
Alphabets are composed of letters to represent individual sounds afaik and Kanji is far from that, instead it represents a word (most of the time, I think? I'm still a beginner when it comes to Japanese, to be honest) and I always see it being mentioned to be a logographic writing system which is the opposite of an alphabet (again, take my word with a grain of salt, Japanese is different than anything I've learnt so far and as I said, I'm in the really early stages of learning the language).
However, you could say that Japanese have three writing systems (two alphabets and one logographic).
However, you could say that Japanese have three writing systems (two alphabets and one logographic).
In case you were curious, the two kana systems would be called "syllabaries" to refer to the fact that each character represents an entire syllable. Of course, most people just call them alphabets for simplicity, which is totally fine, so I only point this out as a curiosity for those interested.
They are indeed called syllabaries, but that is something of a misnomer. The sounds of the fifty sounds are tied to morae, not syllables. It seems to be an open question whether Japanese even has syllables.
I don't really think that there is a difficult language to learn, but it can vary the level of familiarity and challenge because of your native language. For example, as a Spanish speaker, in theory, asian language because they are less familiar, and I might see it as “more difficult" to learn.
I think your personal level of interest influences the perceived complexity of learning a new language. For example, my native language is English. I tried to study French and German and found those languages too boring and struggled to learn them, but I find Japanese relatively easy because I'm more invested in it.
It completely depends on your level of interest and also it could vary depending on your native language. For example my native language is Spanish and we have literally the same syllable sounds in our language! Also romaji is read exactly as it's written in Spanish so that's incredibly easy. Grammar is different tho, and the thing I find most complicated is how words vary depending on politeness level
