Why is Japanese so hard?

Japanese is God's way of telling me I don't know everything.

I've been struggling to learn it all year, and still haven't got through "Who is She?" A lesser woman would have given up. A greater woman would, admittedly, have made more headway. Six months of study and I can only just read the words "I don't speak Japanese".

Why has it been so hard? I can only suggest the following reasons:

1) I have little free time and many distractions
2) It is written all funny
3) The grammar is odd
4) I have been taught all my life that the Japanese are very strange indeed, impossible to understand and that it is safer not to try.

I have discovered that number 4, at least, is wrong. The Japanese are no stranger than the English, WHO ARE NOT STRANGE AT ALL (I'm glad we've cleared that up).

It IS written all funny and that alone nearly scuppered me. I would have liked to have spent the first 6 months just studying romaji, but I didn't have enough beginner texts and couldn't find a good dictionary keyed on romaji. I had to start with unspaced hiragana, which did my head in. I couldn't work out where one word stopped and another word started, so I couldn't even look words up sensibly. The funny thing about Japanese is, if you take a random two or three syllables out of a sentence and look them up, you get a definition like "The Prime Minister's favourite earwig". Probably this is also true for English. I must try it some time.

Anyway, LingQ has now included a function to add spaces to hiragana. It's not perfect, but it's a whole lot better. Also the "mouse over to see hints" function helps a lot. You don't have to be able to read a text any more, just run your mouse over it until you find a definition you like the look of, and then you can save it as a LingQ. You can flashcard and learn LingQs before you learn to read hiragana, and it's not a bad way of learning to read hiragana.

The grammar IS very different from English. There isn't a lot anyone can do about that, except to stop trying to understand the meaning of sentences when they first encounter them. And that, in my opinion, is the problem with the beginner story "Who is She?" Namely, it has a plot. This implies that you should understand it. Personally I would have done a lot better with beginner material equivalent to baby talk, like this (but in Japanese, obviously):

Hello Mr Cat!
cat
a cat
This is a cat.
Is this a cat?
Yes it is a cat!
It is my cat.
Hello Mr. cat!

That has 9 unique words, which is enough for a flashcard session for a beginner in an unknown script. There is little difficulty in working out where one word finishes and the next starts, or which is the verb. It only needs to be combined with a picture of a cat and the general meaning is instantly clear.

I know that there are some LingQers who would be patronised by such "baby content", but no-one is forcing them to study "Hello Mr. Cat!"

A regular topic of conversation on the LingQ forum is "why doesn't LingQ attract professional linguists and scare off Joe Average?" I suggest that it's because we expect Joe Average to be Joe "I'm not going to be put off by not being able to decipher a single word of lesson 1".

Enough ranting. I'm off to look the word "cat" up in Japanese. Six months and I still haven't learned it. Tchah!