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For the people who's tongue is natively English is Japanese hard to learn?

Depends on who you are. Hearing about Arabic, I think that'll be harder for me than Japanese and it's said that Japanese is the hardest language for Westerners to learn.

Yup. That's correct. smile Chinese is the hardest for Westerners, because they have to learn the Kanji a new sentence structure and the different intonations of voice. I'm sure Arabic is right up there with it. sweatdrop Though, Japanese is hard in its own way, just like with any other language.

Personally, I don't think that learning a new language like Japanese or Chinese is harder than learning one's native language, like English. We just get more frustrated with it because it's a bit longer to learn than, say, Spanish, and we gauge our progress with what we know of our native language.
But that's just a thought. Doesn't make the learning and work any easier, unfortunately.

Yeah, American English doesn't really make any sense. I read a book written in England and while reading I'd come across weird sentences like "My family were on the front row."

At first I was like, WOW their English is messed up. That was until I realized it made sense sweatdrop

I am grateful everyday that my native language is English. I don't even want to know how hard or how long it would be to learn to speak and write it fluently. We have so many slang sentences, and often times foreigners get confused because of our spelling....or lack there of. I have heard that English, if not your native language is the hardest to learn. Given the slang and l0// key sort of spelling of things. sweatdrop

Yes is it difficult at times. You have to train your brain to say things in a completely different way. When I first began I found it difficult to do but, now I'm much better after learning for 6 months. Although my pronunciation is still not good and I can not string sentences together without getting tongue tied but, I'm much father along than I was 6 months ago. Speaking may be difficult for you, but what's really going to get you is the writing systems. You have 46 Hiragana characters and 46 Katakana characters to learn plus on top of that more Kanji than you can ever imagine. Ha ha I'm assuming you know all this anyway. I now know Hiragana and Katakana relatively well but, there are times when I have mental blanks have to go back and check. Ha ha but, i have to say now that I find Japanese a lot easier than English. Well writing in Japanese is easier than English that is. Only because English sentence structure is too confusing for me to remember where as Japanese sentence structure is easier to remember.

Just like some people are athletically inclined, others mathmatically gifted and still others who can pick up a pencil and draw something wonderful, we each have strong points. Someone's strengths might lie in learning languages. That he/she can pick up grammer rules, vocabular and sentence structures quicker than others. smile When I say that learning one language is harder than another, I'm talking about as a general rule of thumb. sweatdrop Hope that makes some sense...

...because love is blind.