Do Japanese people learning English struggle as much as I do with Japanese?
When I started to learn Japanese, I noticed the written word is very challenging. Aside from having no talent for the ink brush, sumi & stone, or calligraphy. There is Kana, Kanji, etc. Many thousands of Kanji characters, 44 letters per alphabet (of which there are several, at least 2 still in use for translating sounds). I'll admit I've had more success with the spoken language, watching Japanese TV helped a lot. Hearing, speaking with native speakers helps. There are a number of Japanese books I want to read in the original language without a translation but I'm still using a translator device to assist with the characters I don't recognize. (Translated books always lose the poetic wording of the original, are better read in the original language.)
English on the other hand has more words than most other languages in the world, 26 letters in the modern Greek alphabet. English has 470,000 to 1,000,000 words. Arabic has the most at 12,000,000 words (most of which are variants or conjunctions). The avg. adult English speaker will only use between 11,000 and 35,000 words in their dialogue. It seems there may be challenges both ways. I'm curious weather people find it difficult or not. What are you're thoughts (about learning English)? Is English hard (for a Japanese speaker to learn)? If so, what parts did you struggle with?