Difficulties in learning Japanese

From my point of view, learning Japanese is quite difficult because of the rules that the language enforces in terms of grammar, politeness rules, writing (using a combination of three scripts – Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana) and so forth. These rules are not that hard per say, but it’s quite hard for us to put aside the system that we normally take for granted and replace it with something radically different.Another showstopper when it comes to learning Japanese is that the language is an agglutinative one. What this means is that it’s a “synthetic” language where each affix represents one unit of meaning rather than have the root of the word change. This concept is not easy to understand, or at least not until you get used to it.

Several aspects of Japanese grammar may be surprising to English speakers who are learning Japanese. For example, there is no distinction between singular or plural in Japanese. Moreover, even though Japanese grammar does not assign gender to words, Japanese vocabulary can vary according to whether a man or a woman is speaking.
Word order in Japanese may also pose some difficulties for students learning Japanese. Japanese verbs usually come at the end of the sentence, instead of near the beginning as in English. Since there are no relative pronouns, sentences tend to be long and complicated.
Japanese particles may be difficult, too. All the words in a Japanese sentence are connected by these tiny word fragments, which define the grammar of preceding words. And although learning a plain, spoken style may not frustrate you, as you advance in the Japanese language, you will find expressions of politeness-- honorific and humble forms-- to be somewhat mind-boggling, to say the least.
Japanese pronunciation is dramatically different than English pronunciation. Since all Japanese words end in vowels, English speakers learning Japanese may have to spend quite a long time practicing them to get the hang of the rhythm. At first, the tongue tends to tie itself in knots!
Learning written Japanese is not easy.