Same Obstacle There

What would you guess would be the hardest thing about learning Japanese for non-native speakers? -SamTheButcher

You see there are many types of non-native speakers. Chinese people use 5000 Chinese characters, that used to be completely the same before the World War II, and Koreans learn 1500 Chinese characters, although they ceased to use them in their daily life. So naturally both people can learn Japanese much faster than people in other countries. In standar Japanese 1850 Chinese characters are used frequently. Besides, grammartically speaking Korean has very similar structure -roughly S+O+V type, so Korean will be able to speak very good Japanese in very short time. ( They don't have D sound, so they tend to pronouce To instead of Do as German people pronouce Tochoter instead of daughter.) In the case of Chinese people, the structure of their language is very similar to that of English -Bo Ai Knee which means I love you, they also learn English very quick.

Aside from the cases of both countryman, it is a little tough to learn Japanese, if you intended to learn Romanised Japnese -Japanese transliterated in English alphabet for use other than Japanese, you just concentrate on memorising lots of words and expressions as I picked out. I believe that's the best way for you to learn Japanese. Because Japanese people can understand Latinised Japanese as in Ohayou gozaimasu-Good morning. Probably it's much easier for you to learn languages whose words are written in English alphabet, so I recommend you to learn Chinese, Japanese, through English alphabet. Korean has their own alphabet called Hangle, so in the case of Korean, it depends.

Among European languages, Russian and Greek use different alphabet, and I never heard people who learned those languages without knowing how to write their alphabet, so it is worth while to learn their characters. Korean alphabet -Hangle and Japanese phonetic signs -Kanas are just easy to memorise if you intend to do it. 26 or 50x2 are not so large number, if you really intend to spare time for them. Or if you are a scholar. So anyway I recommend you to start learning by heart some expressions, then when you lost your interest on these languages, you just had a free hand to use those expressions when in need ( if you use the expression Hajimemashite when you start talking to a Japanese for the first time, they will sure to feel you are friendly, and agreeable, something like that, of course even if you didn't use these expressions, it is undoubt you are though.

So when you asked What would you guess would be the hardest thing about learning Japanese for non-native speakers?, I must say there are many. But if you choose to learn Japanese in English alphabet, you can be an even more fluent Japanese speaker thannative people. Because I must say for Japanese, extremely complicated way of writing Japanese ( combination of three characters ) is the biggest obstacle casting big black clouds ahead of our future, in the age of the Internet, in the age of people can travel to Mars, I think Japanese people must overcome their orthography. But still they keep on staying on this obstacle with their fingers untouched.