> It's not just Japanese, it's a whole lot of languages. Finnish, German, and Spanish come right to my mind, and I'm sure there are many more. I would guess the majority of the world's languages have close to 1-to-1 correspondence between written and spoken letters. But because English does not, English speakers have trouble learning these languages.

What native English speakers have trouble learning to pronounce written Spanish? We may have trouble pronouncing the sounds in Spanish that we don't have (e.g. the Spanish R sounds), but I've never heard of anyone complaining that we can't figure it out because the orthography is too straightforward. "This is too simple! I can't figure it out!" Come on.

Part of the reason Japanese seems so easy to pronounce is because it's not a very phonetically diverse language. There is a very small phoneme set, the vowels are pretty much always pronounced identically, and there are only five vowels.

It's also worth noting that Japanese is really only easy to pronounce when it's been transcribed into the Latin alphabet -- actually learning to read written Japanese is probably as hard or harder as learning to read written English, since you just have to memorize thousands of unique characters that usually have zero relationship to their pronunciation. If I were to transcribe spoken English words into a phonetic alphabet, it would also be easy to pronounce.

Ste "Though learning to read hiragana and katakana is simple" phen