> Japanese is easier than English! It's such a logical language!

I initially thought your post was a joke, but the second half seemed serious. Japense is *not* logical. There are so many useless conventions: the many different ways are there to count things, the levels of formality and some of the conjugation rules are just nuts.

You say that you've only learned some Romaaji and kana. Just wait until you try and learn Kanji. It's one of the least logical writing systems you could devise. Sometimes the Chinese meaning of the symbol has something to do with the meaning of the kanji, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes combining two characters makes a compound word that means what you'd expect if you combined the two characters and sometimes it creates a word totally unrelated to the original two characters. Oh, and don't draw the strokes in the wrong order.

If you're trying to read kanji (and even kana), you can run into a mess of problems because there are so many homophones in Japanese, owing to the fact that there just aren't enough sounds in the language. Look up the word "ki" in a Japanese dictionary and see how many kanji there are for it. Also, depending on context, the kanji can mean completely different words. This happens in English, of course, but with less frequency.

As for Japanese being easier than English, I have trouble believing that. I'm not going to argue that English is easy, but sentence construction generally follows some pretty standard forms. We don't conjugate our verbs differently depending on formality (we really don't have different levels of formality at all). Inflection in speech is largely irrelevant, unless you're trying to be sarcastic. We have one definite article (the) and only two indefinite articles (a/an, though there are some occassions where a word like "one" becomes an indefinite article). Even better, we never have to change our articles depending on the gender of the noun.

I'll grant that spelling and pronouncing English is quite a chore, but reading it for understanding is not. A sixth-grader could quite easily read and understand the content of most major English newspapers. Reading comprehension can be greatly improved by studying some common root words, suffixes and prefixes. This can hardly be said of Japanese, which basically requires rote memorization of a few thousand characters.

I have no trouble believing that you're doing well in Japanese, and I encourage you to continue it. I would suggest, though, that this may well be because you have a natural affinity for picking up languages. Japanese is not, for most people, an easy language to pick up. And it is certainly not logical or consistent.

Stephen