Re:Don't bother learning japanese (Score 1)

"Nuts" is an interesting way to describe a writing system with four alphabets, two of which have 35 characters each (not counting the and '' modifiers), one of which (romaji) is used basically to insert random english words into songs to make them make even less sense than they would in japanese, and one of which has tens of thousands of characters and which is basically impossible to really learn if you didn't grow up in Japan or China. Oddly enough, katakana and hiragana really aren't that hard to pick up and use with a little practice, but god, forget about kanji if you weren't born knowing it. I took a couple of years of japanese in college, and I know enough to stumble my way through native manga (relying heavily on the furigana). I bought a copy of the first Harry Potter book in japanese and barely got past the first sentence. I think it's not really an issue of the language being difficult in and of itself, but rather that the difficulty of learning to communicate in a foreign language increases with physical and cultural distance. It's not that it's impossible for a westerner to learn to think in terms of social hierarchy, just that it requires concious effort and that unless you're constantly in situations that require that kind of thinking, you won't be likely to retain it.