Only for a very loose definition of "speaking"

A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa. You'd recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign.

Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones. Most English speakers wouldn't recognize "terebi" (television) or "konbini" (convenience store) for example.

English is a mess because it is a mixture of languages from different ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and Norman. It's been used for cross-cultural communication ever since it was identifiable as English.

Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones. Some linguists have observed that trade pidgins develop English-like morphologies, even when English is not one of the contributing languages.

(And even Scheme got messy; see R6RS and R7RS...)

As for Japanese, I love it, it's beautiful, but as even any weeaboo knows, Japanese language is very bound up with Japanese culture. You can't simply ignore or elide the politeness bits; where you stand in society very strongly influences what you say. The fact that English is largely free of this baggage helps make it an effective language that people around the world pick up and use for trade, especially when different ethnic groups are involved.

English language is like Chinese: while simple structurally (no cases, constructive verb forms, etc) has a terribly complicated writing and pronunciation system, where there sort of are rules, but you never know when you hit an exception. Despite that, people take it up, because the important communication happens in English. (People who study areas like ML, or who work a lot with industrial production, likely pick up some Chinese, out of the same necessity.)

https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/stand-up-comedy-english-lang...

For instance, Gad mentions in the article the expression "Got it" that doesn't have great equivalents in French. But French also has sentences that don't have great equivalents in English, or if they do have one it's not nearly as playful.

The one thing English has that most languages don't is a massive body of work and a dominant grip on international culture, and I think that's what the comics in the article are interpreting as higher overall playfulness.

I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).

Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.

"So stop ragging on C++, you meanies!"?

It would be interesting to see a Scheme-like underpinning to the semantics of any language -- maybe not to be used for communication in its own right, but to achieve things like more intelligent translation, or NLP machine-learning applications that extract meaning from a text. I don't see much interest in something like this emerging, however, with the current trend in AI being "throw more statistics at the problem".

You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language

I've been tempted to learn Korean since I discovered this factoid, but haven't found a program or the time that I can stick to.

Anecdotally, I'm learning Dutch right now to prepare to move overseas next month, and the basics haven't been that difficult. I feel pretty confident that I can order food and exchange daily phrases after only a few dozen hours of practice. Lucky for me, the Dutch also speak excellent English, but I'm trying to learn anyway!

Featural scripts are pretty rare - it seems that they never evolve naturally, so it's something that has to be constructed, and then also to become popular for long enough to stick around. The only example I know of other than Hangeul is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics, and they are noticeably less featural.

(Featural scripts for conlangs are more common - e.g. for Lojban, there's Zbalermorna: https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/)

One thing to keep in mind though is that Hangeul was very systematic and consistent back when it was designed. But languages evolve, and they evolve much faster in the absence of widespread literacy and mass media. And Hangeul is almost 600 years old now. So e.g. ㅐ was originally the diphthong "ai", consisting of ㅏ for "a" and ㅣ for "i", but it's now pronounced "e" - not dissimilar to English, actually, but with much more rapid and drastic changes. At this point, it's actually less phonemic than Serbo-Croatian.

Still, if you can speak Dutch it’s appreciated, especially in less international areas.

I would say hebrew is also another interesting alphabet system

Up until 90s, early 2000s it was common to read Hanja in newspapers. Starting around 10 years ago they all disappeared. English words have largely replaced complicated Chinese characters and young Koreans no longer learn it.

Instead English loan words are now used so much that most Koreans can't go a few paragraph without using it. Downside it leads to confusion as to what the original Korean words meant. But for sure it is not comparable to Japanese which absolutely requires you to memorize a few thousand Chinese characters, their strokes, pronounciation and meaning.

English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.

Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.

While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)

And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.

E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).

The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...

Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.

Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

"Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it".

> Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.

Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.)

> Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.

Yeah, that's me.

> almost totally dying out

That too.

> among the younger generations.

That's not me.

It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,".

Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial".

And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).

There are only two real problems:

1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext.

2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.

Tackle Kanji after mastering Katakana and Hiragana.

It took me a few weeks to be able to read a hiragana sentence, just read not necessarily understand, without needing to look anything up.

Most of the complexity is merely that it requires a lot of memorization, though. One has to literally remember a couple thousand of characters, memorizing their meanings and a few possible readings. Obviously one remember them not as a random opaque pictogram but by mentally splitting it in smaller graphemes. And there are, IIRC, like, about 30 or so most common ones that are enough for most characters one would normally encounter.

Either way, it's surely much more complex than systems that only have alphabets or syllabaries, but in a personal (and biased, because I know one and failed to grok the other) opinion some segmental scripts like Arabic are much harder to process.

There are additional levels of honorifics which can be far more complicated but (outside of workplace honorifics -- which you will need to practice if you will work at a Japanese company) native speakers usually get some kind of training in how to speak in that exceptionally formal way (the kind of keigo used in restaurants is sometimes criticised for being "incorrect" Japanese and is called バイト敬語 -- usually service workers literally get handed a manual which explains how to interact with customers using this form of 敬語). If you or I had an audience with the queen we would probably also get some kind of training in how to politely speak to her.

Finally, if it's obvious you're studying Japanese and you drop a です or ます the person is quite unlikely to be insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your superior at work.

If a grammar is too limited that it leaves things unsaid and thus ambiguous (well, I can't say that's not a thing in Japanese - it is, sometimes) then yes, it can make things harder because one gotta very carefully watch out for the context to be able to comprehend what's going on.

But if grammar is just simple - e.g. if there are no or almost no irregular verbs (Japanese has only two), or no concept of grammatical gender (so you simply don't have to care about anything related to your nouns and can indicate gender using an extra word if that starts to matter), it's probably just fine. I mean you're not losing anything in that case.

Considering your example (even though I don't think it's a good idea to compare machine and human languages in general) - many assembly languages do NOT exactly map to the actual machine code. Say, many assembly languages remove the concept of argument size which can be compared to a grammatical gender (your operands are your nouns and instruction is a verb). Let's say we're talking classic x86. In Intel syntax you can write "MOV AX, 0" and "MOV EAX, 0" but bytecode would be different - 66B80000 vs B800000000, the assembly had lost the 0x66 operand-size override prefix. There is AT&T syntax that has distinct "MOVW" and "MOVL", but the point is that it's a potentially unnecessary complication that proves to be not needed as everything is pretty much obvious without it.

If that doesn't scare you, go ahead.

If you can imagine a language where 2k+ emoji are used as parts of words, with all the combination rules which emoji have, that would give you some idea.

But it does tax your memory (nothing compared to Chinese, though!), and takes time when writing by hand. Typing is significantly easier because a reasonable IME gives you variants to choose from when you type the pronunciation.

(1) It isn't fun. Not everyone of us knows the whole set and have to keep a digital dictionary in smartphone

(2) We don't assume the names of people based on their Kanji, because (surpise!) people do get offended by minor changes in pronunciation e.g Yamasaki vs. Yamazaki, with similar Kanjis.

That's why I always prefer to inscribe my Japanese notes with Kana in a superscript wherever needed. It is very tight in grammar but the language is not easy by any means. In fact, same goes for Chinese & Koreans.

Note that even (or maybe especially) Japanese people don’t do this either.

The first thing anyone introducing themselves does is say how to write/say their name.

> actually pictorial to some degree

Only in the same sense that star constellations are pictorial.

https://youtu.be/unKrseRCOKo

I really feel like this is appropriate.

Tree: 木

Forest: 森

For example, the character for people (民) comes from the image of a person being pierced through the eye, which was done to mark slaves in ancient China. Eventually the character and meaning evolved to the way it's used now.

Rest: 休 (person leaning against a tree)

Someone with a quirky personality might say that :)

Nah, OK, so it seems I've misunderstood that then.

Hei, vasta 27 v tässä pakkosuomen maassa...

I thought you were going to link this guy but both work :)

huge nuance here. it is not fun memorizing hyroglyphics

Although some sequences are completely new, so you need to figure out which word ends where.

And the most commonly used kanji also have the highest number of different pronunciations, sometimes in several ways that are impossible to tell apart grammatically (or even semantically, obviously this is almost never annotated, because adding the pronunciation is for words the author thinks you don't know, even when the pronunciation is entirely unambiguous*)

*: No I'm not bitter I had way too much trouble figuring out how to annotate Japanese text with the pronunciation to make it vaguely readable, why do you ask?

Some have a lot more. 下 has two On readings (Ka and Ge) and several Kun readings (Shita, Shimo, Moto, Sa, Kuda, and O).

While combinations typically do have one reading, some can have multiple readings, especially people’s names. Still, it is hard for learners to know which reading for individual Kanji’s are the right ones a lot of times.

EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos and a premature submit.

> "While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word."

Are you suggesting that these various readings are academic and not commonly used? If so, that is incorrect. All the readings are used in common words.

Here are examples of both the On and Kun readings for the kanji 水 being used:

水道: Pronounced "suido" and means "water supply" or "water service."

水着: Pronounced "mizugi" and means "swimsuit."

Here are examples of both the On readings for the kanji 下 being used:

下降: Pronounced "kakou" and means "descent."

下水: Pronounced "gesui" and means "sewer."

Here are examples of all the Kun readings for the kanji 下 being used:

下着: Pronounced "shitagi" and means "underwear."

下々: Pronounced "shimojimo" and means "commoners" or "common people".

法の下 (can also be written as 法の元): Pronounced "hounomoto" and means "under the law."

下さい: Pronounced "kudasai" and means "please."

下りる: Pronounced "oriru" and means "to get off."

Your comparison to the various pronunciations of "ou" in English seems off as well. For example, if you mispronounce "cough" using the "ou" pronunciation of "rough," you'll sound weird but will most likely be understood. However, if you misread "oriru" (下りる) as "kariru," using the On reading "KA" instead of the correct Kun reading, you'd be verbalizing a completely different word. Instead of telling others you're getting off of something, you'd be saying you're borrowing something.

I'd characterize your example of "ou" as a mispronunciation in English, whereas your example in Japanese would be a misreading.

I hope this helps.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

In my (limited) experience so far however I find myself remembering the words themselves, rather than work out their pronunciation from their constituent kanji. To me working from the pronunciations of the kanji themselves is like trying to pronounce 'cough' by fitting together pronunciations for 'c', 'ou', and 'gh' (all of which have several options interestingly enough).

Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.

For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.

It’s certainly not easy for everyone.

Also I don’t know how much actual conversational practice you get from day to day life - but at least for me, I talk with my wife and my (mostly Japanese) friends in Japanese for hours every day, and that makes a huge difference. Once a week would simply not be enough.

http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul

"However the character 古 gǔ also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 gǔ) than the 蒙古 Měng-gǔ". From palace records that 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ʼPhags-pa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire."

Might be true, might be not. Still interesting to see. And the Mongols themselves mostly stopped using their script to write in Cyrillic and Hanzi (?) now so.

We have another example of such great men creating a new script by himself after exposure to another script. Cherokee by Sequayah.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

First is, of course, tengwar, but no real spoken language uses it.

Second if hangul, which is great overall and has an easy structure [2], with just a few historic warts.

Third, there's Cree syllabary. Just look at the logic: [3].

[1]: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Tengwar#Spelling_and_pronunciat... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/hangulanationallanguage/photo-... [3]: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/plains-cree-syllabics-tr...

https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/

Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.

Do you have a source on that? As a Bulgarian (where Cyrillic comes from) i had never heard anything of the like, and a short Google, in Bulgarian or Russian, found nothing.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2_(%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%...

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AE%D1%81_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B...

From there the transformation into "Я" is obvious. And it happened gradually over time long before Peter; he just happened to look at various different shapes already in use during his time, picked the one that looked the simplest and the most appealing to him, and (sometimes) did further minor tweaks to simplify.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the letter "R".

There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn.

'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow'

'I go later' vs. 'I will go later'

Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".

I will go

I will be going

I will have gone

I will have been going

Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that:

* The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb

* More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"!

> He would frequently go out for dinner.

Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will".

* English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"

The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German).

Compare the sentence pair:

"Every day at 6, I eat dinner"

"Every day at 6, I will eat dinner"

They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.

FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.

Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).

Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).

Here's what I mean:

1. Go to this link: http://erg.delph-in.net/logon .

2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list.

3. Click "Analyze"

4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line.

5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box.

That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary).

If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb).

If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know.

-------

By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.

I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages.

There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another.

It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.

Obviously, nobody is claiming that Japanese has no way of talking about the future, that's the kind of nonsense non-linguists like to read into purely grammatical differences. It's still a fact that English has a grammatical future (actually more than one), even if it's not inflectional and not strictly required in all situations, and Japanese does not.

For example, "tomorrow, it's cold" would generally sound weird in English, the most common way to express this would be "tomorrow, it's gonna be cold". There's nothing weird about 明日は寒い, by contrast.

To be clear, I completely disagree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis & don't think there's anything "weird" about Japanese, the past / nonpast split as opposed to past / present / future is quite common cross-linguistically[1]. The idea of whether something is grammaticalized is separate than whether a language can express it -- AFAIK the current theory is that all languages express just about the same set of concepts, just certain languages evolve grammaticalizations of tenses, aspects, topic, politeness, etc. and others represent them "ad hoc" via constructs like "do tomorrow" etc. Hopefully that makes sense. I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.

[1]: And there are lots of systems, like multiple levels of past remoteness, too: https://wals.info/feature/66A#2/26.7/149.2

These humongous walls of text sound rather like "and therefore I choose to define what English does as 'grammaticalize' and what Japanese does as 'not grammaticalize'".

> I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.

Then maybe have another think about why you're coming off as if that's exactly what you're doing.

going = present

gone = preterite

No future tense there.

You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present tense, but it is not the same thing.

«going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite».

They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles.

Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.

They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).

The fact remains there's no future participles in English.

None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible.

Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense.

Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.

In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).

For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais).

Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.

Muahahahaa, good one!

I'm going to go

I'm going to be going (?)

I'm going to have gone (??)

I'm going to have been going (??)

Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common

(Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)

+1 Funny because it's true.

An elegant language that is easy to learn should be based off of consistent primitives. Similar to math where an entire mathematical language can be derived from a few axioms. For a language you should have a single alphabet and consistent grammar rules.

Such a language is not only more elegant, but much more practical to learn as well. And Practicality is by far more important then elegance.

Except for all the exceptions. Also, the millions of different ways you need to manipulate your verbs based on what comes after/what you are talking about.

Oh, and that you cannot read/write contemporary Japanese without knowing at least 3 writing systems (with a minimum of 54 characters each).

The hardest part of learning Japanese for me was Kanji (which I still forget all the time if I’m not using an IME or a dictionary).

Though you could more than double it again by including all the variations I suppose.

Right, because what's a West Germanic language very similar to Frisian doing all the way over in New Guinea?

The reason borrowed words are written in katakana is too provide a clue that the word may have a non-standard pronunciation.

It functions similarly to how italicization does in English

Among many other stylistic uses, katakana are often used for native onomatopoeia and are used to write native words all the time (usually in cases where the kanji is either not well-known or to give a different feeling to the sentence -- ズルい is a good example of this).

This is largely similar.