Most people who see Japanese (or other Asian languages) first time think it's a kind of an extraterrestrial language because those languages are completely different to others. What do Japanese think about Western languages? Is it comfortable or difficult for you to read texts by letters and not by syllables/ideograms? Which language(s) do you like the most?

Question

makosmakom · Answer

In my case the difficulty to learn European languages is to understand grammatical structures, once I remembered alphabets, understood grammar,  then if read certain amounts of texts, it becomes not so much difficult to read.. 
My favorite language is Russian, it’s hard to learn because of its complicated grammar, but worth to learn, I think.

Dragonflyer · Answer

I was surprised too, when I first encountered an language totally unknown to me and realised languages can be different so much.

I agree Western languages and Japanese have almost nothing in common. Word order, tense, aspect, case, conjunction, gender, articles, number, subject-prominence (Japanese is a topic-prominent language), etc. Especially unpredictable noun gender and too-complicated conjugation of verbs were quite a surprise to me and even now make me ughhh.

French is my favorite among western languages, maybe because it’s relatively similar to English, compared to German or Russian (I have no idea why they need so many grammatical cases after all lol). If I could choose any, the Japanese sign language would be my favorite. It’s completely different from any spoken languages in grammar and “pronunciation”.

I don’t feel uncomfortable with texts by alphabets any longer, though I admit I feel much more relaxed and a kind of at home when reading Mandarin.

Actually what surprises me the most is the fact that any “alien” language can be suddenly intelligible after learning it for some period of time. It’s always been a mystery and wonder to me why we can understand words of “extraterrestrial species” :-)