> The thing is that you don't have to learn 2000 symbols to learn Spanish.
You have to memorize words, though.
That's true, but it's easier to do while using them. You can "read" Spanish without knowing Spanish. You can't do the same with Japanese.
You can pronounce written Spanish words without knowing what they mean. However, I imagine that most people actually want to know what they are reading.
Also true, although you could get the pronounciation very wrong. It happens to be a few time with English. Regardless, being able to read it make it easier. For example, search for "industria" is easier than searching for "業界", especially for text on a picture. Google translate's OCR is not great, and reproducing the drawings to get a translation is painful and takes a lot of time.
That's because Japanese is a popular language to learn, especially in HN-type communities, and to learn Japanese you, most of the time, have to learn Kanji
> never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News
There are some https://hn.algolia.com/?q=learn+spanish. The thing is that you don't have to learn 2000 symbols to learn Spanish. I also think that many "hacker type" people consider raw memorization "boring" compared to conversation or playing around with the language.