Japanese grammar is starkly minimalist. It's not hard to learn at all, the basic structure is almost purely agglutinative, and the word order is consistently head-final in all cases (e.g. SOV for sentence and modifier-modified for not only adjectives but also relative and appositive clauses), and it helps that Japanese doesn't grammatically track several things that other languages do, such as person, number, or gender.
There are only two real problems:
1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext.
2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.
Kanji is indeed complex but you can memorize Katakana and Hiragana in a couple of hours and they will help you tremendously in things like navigating the public transport signage. They have a few more characters than 26, but each letter has exactly one pronunciation. None of that context-dependent pronunciation stuff like English is full of.
Tackle Kanji after mastering Katakana and Hiragana.
Most of the complexity is merely that it requires a lot of memorization, though. One has to literally remember a couple thousand of characters, memorizing their meanings and a few possible readings. Obviously one remember them not as a random opaque pictogram but by mentally splitting it in smaller graphemes. And there are, IIRC, like, about 30 or so most common ones that are enough for most characters one would normally encounter.
Either way, it's surely much more complex than systems that only have alphabets or syllabaries, but in a personal (and biased, because I know one and failed to grok the other) opinion some segmental scripts like Arabic are much harder to process.
You're forgetting the difficulty of learning the elaborate system of honorifics, without which you'll be unable to talk to a native speaker without insulting them. The title of this book gives some idea: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim...
While that is technically true standard 敬語/honorifics (です/ます and a few word choices) aren't really that complicated.
There are additional levels of honorifics which can be far more complicated but (outside of workplace honorifics -- which you will need to practice if you will work at a Japanese company) native speakers usually get some kind of training in how to speak in that exceptionally formal way (the kind of keigo used in restaurants is sometimes criticised for being "incorrect" Japanese and is called バイト敬語 -- usually service workers literally get handed a manual which explains how to interact with customers using this form of 敬語). If you or I had an audience with the queen we would probably also get some kind of training in how to politely speak to her.
Finally, if it's obvious you're studying Japanese and you drop a です or ます the person is quite unlikely to be insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your superior at work.
Just to relate back to the original point of adopting a universal language, I would guess that if any language were adopted as a world-wide language, then things like honorifics and formal-informal distinctions and gendered articles/nouns would be dropped pretty quickly.
You're mistaking simplicity and lack of capabilities.
If a grammar is too limited that it leaves things unsaid and thus ambiguous (well, I can't say that's not a thing in Japanese - it is, sometimes) then yes, it can make things harder because one gotta very carefully watch out for the context to be able to comprehend what's going on.
But if grammar is just simple - e.g. if there are no or almost no irregular verbs (Japanese has only two), or no concept of grammatical gender (so you simply don't have to care about anything related to your nouns and can indicate gender using an extra word if that starts to matter), it's probably just fine. I mean you're not losing anything in that case.
Considering your example (even though I don't think it's a good idea to compare machine and human languages in general) - many assembly languages do NOT exactly map to the actual machine code. Say, many assembly languages remove the concept of argument size which can be compared to a grammatical gender (your operands are your nouns and instruction is a verb). Let's say we're talking classic x86. In Intel syntax you can write "MOV AX, 0" and "MOV EAX, 0" but bytecode would be different - 66B80000 vs B800000000, the assembly had lost the 0x66 operand-size override prefix. There is AT&T syntax that has distinct "MOVW" and "MOVL", but the point is that it's a potentially unnecessary complication that proves to be not needed as everything is pretty much obvious without it.
I understand that simple is better than easy in many cases, that's the whole idea of lisp like languages, but I am not sure it is true for languages, especially for comprehension. Because things sound the same and there is no distinction it makes it hard for listening or even reading comprehension. Many time it is much easier to quickly decipher what a javascript function is doing than lisp because the lisp simplicity doesn't give you those immediate anchors to look at, it all looks the same.
Kanji are fun to learn, because they are constructive to some degree, and actually pictorial to some degree.
If you can imagine a language where 2k+ emoji are used as parts of words, with all the combination rules which emoji have, that would give you some idea.
But it does tax your memory (nothing compared to Chinese, though!), and takes time when writing by hand. Typing is significantly easier because a reasonable IME gives you variants to choose from when you type the pronunciation.
A good chunk of the roughly ~2100 Kanji have two versions of expression. Some of them have upto 8-10 ways of usage (although very few). As a Japanese resident,
(1) It isn't fun. Not everyone of us knows the whole set and have to keep a digital dictionary in smartphone
(2) We don't assume the names of people based on their Kanji, because (surpise!) people do get offended by minor changes in pronunciation e.g Yamasaki vs. Yamazaki, with similar Kanjis.
That's why I always prefer to inscribe my Japanese notes with Kana in a superscript wherever needed. It is very tight in grammar but the language is not easy by any means. In fact, same goes for Chinese & Koreans.
Some make direct sense like the tree/forest, others you have to deep dive into their history for them to make sense (if at all).
For example, the character for people (民) comes from the image of a person being pierced through the eye, which was done to mark slaves in ancient China. Eventually the character and meaning evolved to the way it's used now.
So you can't say "rest" without mentioning a tree? Finnish is funny in similar ways due to its ubiquitous forests. To "hunt" is "metsästää", "metsä" being "forest" the place you went to look for food.
You can say you metsästää for mushrooms (and other edibles) in the forest too, though, can't you? So maybe it's actually more of a direct correspondence to "forage". And, is that perhaps derived from / related to "forest"? (Or fodder?)
Not really, metsästää implies hunting for living things.
There's a dedicated verb for mushroom foraging, sienestää, or you can say sienimetsässä, "in the mushroom forest".
It's not that bad, most sequences of kanji have just a single (common) way to pronounce them.
Although some sequences are completely new, so you need to figure out which word ends where.
And the most commonly used kanji also have the highest number of different pronunciations, sometimes in several ways that are impossible to tell apart grammatically (or even semantically, obviously this is almost never annotated, because adding the pronunciation is for words the author thinks you don't know, even when the pronunciation is entirely unambiguous*)
*: No I'm not bitter I had way too much trouble figuring out how to annotate Japanese text with the pronunciation to make it vaguely readable, why do you ask?
Most Kanji have at least two ways to pronounce them, the On reading and the Kun reading. For example, 水 (meaning water) can be pronounced as both “Mizu” and “Sui.”
Some have a lot more. 下 has two On readings (Ka and Ge) and several Kun readings (Shita, Shimo, Moto, Sa, Kuda, and O).
While combinations typically do have one reading, some can have multiple readings, especially people’s names. Still, it is hard for learners to know which reading for individual Kanji’s are the right ones a lot of times.
EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos and a premature submit.
While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word. For instance 水 in isolation is (almost?) never pronounced 'sui'. To say it has 2 different pronunciations is a bit like pointing out 'ou' has about 4~5 different pronunciations in English.
Thanks for your reply. Maybe I can help clear this up a bit.
> "While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word."
Are you suggesting that these various readings are academic and not commonly used? If so, that is incorrect. All the readings are used in common words.
Here are examples of both the On and Kun readings for the kanji 水 being used:
水道: Pronounced "suido" and means "water supply" or "water service."
水着: Pronounced "mizugi" and means "swimsuit."
Here are examples of both the On readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下降: Pronounced "kakou" and means "descent."
下水: Pronounced "gesui" and means "sewer."
Here are examples of all the Kun readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下着: Pronounced "shitagi" and means "underwear."
下々: Pronounced "shimojimo" and means "commoners" or "common people".
法の下 (can also be written as 法の元): Pronounced "hounomoto" and means "under the law."
下さい: Pronounced "kudasai" and means "please."
下りる: Pronounced "oriru" and means "to get off."
Your comparison to the various pronunciations of "ou" in English seems off as well. For example, if you mispronounce "cough" using the "ou" pronunciation of "rough," you'll sound weird but will most likely be understood. However, if you misread "oriru" (下りる) as "kariru," using the On reading "KA" instead of the correct Kun reading, you'd be verbalizing a completely different word. Instead of telling others you're getting off of something, you'd be saying you're borrowing something.
I'd characterize your example of "ou" as a mispronunciation in English, whereas your example in Japanese would be a misreading.
Thanks for the detailed response. I think I do understand your point.
In my (limited) experience so far however I find myself remembering the words themselves, rather than work out their pronunciation from their constituent kanji. To me working from the pronunciations of the kanji themselves is like trying to pronounce 'cough' by fitting together pronunciations for 'c', 'ou', and 'gh' (all of which have several options interestingly enough).
Japanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.
I had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on デバドラ (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized English but it took a while to realize it is "device driver".
Man, I had a similar experience working with code from a French manufacturer. The comments were mostly translatable, but the variable names were hell. It's bad enough trying to figure out in English whether acc is an abbreviation of acceleration, or accuracy, or some acronym, etc. Trying to expand a three letter abbreviations in a language you don't know it's nearly impossible.
Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.
They like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously you have 四字熟語, but most onomatopoeia are four kana, and a lot of other emphatic words are four kana). I was watching a let's play YouTuber who started referring to Breath of the Wild as ブレワイ (burewai).
I guess we do the same in English - obviously there’s using an acronym (BotW) but often people will use a single word in a multi-word title - like “Smash” for one of the Smash Brothers games
From my experience, the Japanese love four-katakana abbrevations as much as English-speakers love our two-letter and three-letter acronyms.
For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.
It is literally the hardest language to learn for English speakers. Regardless of what you hear about the elegance of its grammar, this is a real fact backed up with evidence from past learners. Know what you're getting yourself into.
Check out Cure Dolly on YouTube and weep at the poor quality of instruction that you’re probably receiving.
Also I don’t know how much actual conversational practice you get from day to day life - but at least for me, I talk with my wife and my (mostly Japanese) friends in Japanese for hours every day, and that makes a huge difference. Once a week would simply not be enough.
