The first question that might come to mind of someone to whom Asian languages are not their area of expertise goes something like this: Is Japanese hard?
I'll briefly give my thoughts on this matter. In my opinion, Japanese is not just hard, it's very hard (for someone who writes in Latin). It takes a fair amount of tenacity for an individual to learn this language well. Fun fact: Ministry of foreign affairs of the US estimated that it takes 2250 hours to attain conversational proficiency in Japanese. They based it on an average time it takes a diplomat in training to do it, and I mind you, these are fairly intelligent people. Many often hit a performance plateau in the various stages of the learning process, and they are very likely to give up (especially when the hit it in the very beginning), and I don't blame them. Learning Japanese can be sometimes chaotic because it seems that it's really hard to find feasible sources for studying.
There are tons of apps that teach Japanese slightly in a slightly different manner which leaves most of the beginners absolutely baffled because they don't have a concrete method which would help them learn in a systematic manner from the very beginning. It's especially troubling when someone is trying to learn a language completely different from their mother tongue because they have very little to relate to and they basically start in a "tabula rasa" style. After attaining some rudimentary competence, they often settle for the first approach they find on the internet which results in them studying inefficiently hence losing mojo fairly quickly because they notice that they put in the work and they got almost nothing out of it as a return.
So, let me illustrate why Japanese is so complicated. Basically, there are three alphabets:
a) Hiragana - a basic alphabet which is used by young children + as an add-on to some words and almost all grammar is constructed from it (for instance when you want to change a noun to an adjective you all a string of hiragana at the end to differentiate in between these two).
b) Katakana - this one is used for foreign words that are naturalized for the needs of Japanese, so they have slightly butchered pronunciation/reading (e. g. game = gei-mu).
c) Kanji - kanji are symbols adopted from the Chinese language. There are about 2500 of them that are regularly used. Why? Every kanji has a distinct meaning, however, more often than not, kanji itself is not an actual word even though it has a sufficient meaning to be classified as an actual word. For instance, the word NAME contains kanji for NAME and BEFORE and kanji for NAME does not really make sense by itself, it has to be paired with BEFORE to produce word NAME.
Confused? You have any right to be. To be able to read and write on a proficient level, you need to know 3 alphabets - one of which contains more than 2500 distinct characters that are commonly used and most of these characters are not even words themselves, therefore you need to often learn the right combination of the character (2-5) to be able to write or read a word. Compared to reading, grammar and speaking (although they have its niches) are not as hard. Rather than hard, I would call them unnatural, but once you get the hang of it, it's not really that much harder than other languages (given that you have a sufficient vocabulary -1500 words minimum).
Now, that I've provided some surface level info on how the language work, it seems reasonable to point out that Japanese is hard and you shouldn't commit to learning the language unless you a) really like it or b) you are sure that it will be valuable to you in the future (ideally the combination of both because sinking 2250 hours into something that does not fulfill both of these requirements doesn't seem like a good deal).
Let me start with the aforementioned figure first. 2250 hours is a lot of time but is it really that much if you consider Japanese to be a valuable skill? It essentially means that if you will have learned Japanese for about 3 hours a day, it would take roughly two years to attain conversational fluency. Converted into the more digestible metrics, it does not sound that bad all of a sudden. Fluent in 2 years if you are willing to put in the work? Fine by me, however, the most people don't have that kind of patience.
One crucial point omitted from this equation is that you don't need 2250 hours to have a chat with someone in Japanese. If you are clever, you study efficiently and prioritize appropriate study material you can have (sort of ) a chat with someone in Japanese after about 1/10th of that time. After that point, it's all about further expanding your words and kanji vocabulary, working on your grammar and practising speaking/writing. The initial ~250 hours is the toughest because you have, so to speak, no ideas what is going on and you are wandering around stupidly (most of the time) trying to attain that critical mass of knowledge that would "push you over".
Note: the initial 250 hours are the toughest especially if you use "my" approach to learning Japanese which means, essentially, chipping at many blocks of knowledge at the same time. It will leave you overwhelmed in the short term but will have a positive compounding effect in the long term. So what do I mean by these blocks? Let's say that there are 6 building blocks you need to master:
1. Learn ~2500 most used kanji
2. Learn ~5000 most used words
3. Learn all essential and widely used grammar
These three blocks can be characterized as a bottom-up approach to learning Japanese. They do not do a whole lot by themselves (if I am generous, they will allow you to read something moderately advanced at a mediocre pace). If you focus all of your effort on these three first, omitting the latter three then sure you will know the proper grammar and vocab but you will be rusty as hell because you didn't practice any of the practical skills. Sure reading might be relatively okay but good luck going out there and trying to talk to someone in Japanese. They will most likely don't understand you at all because of the simple things like your pronunciation will be off. To offset this, one should also practice these three "top-down" blocks:
4. Reading
5. Writing (Japanese in use etc. - some kind of grammar/sentence creation exercises)
6. Listening/Speaking (this is the hardest one by far)
All of the 6 six building blocks are not listed in this order coincidentally. They are ordered from the most bottom-up to the most top-down skill. To understand words you need kanji. To understand and use grammar effectively, you need to have a sizable vocabulary. To read comfortably, you need to understand the majority of grammar etc. (you get the point).
To conclude this post, in my mind, learning Japanese effectively means to be able to get to the point of being able to practice domains 1-6 simultaneously, therefore the first major goal should be to read very well, write well and listen/speak somewhat well. From that, it's just a grind to attain higher competence in these domains. It's a much tougher approach but much better one than learning a lot of kanji/vocab and not being able to write/say even one moderately complicated sentence.
That would be it from me for now, I hope you are having a great day!
Cheers
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