Haha, tell me about it. Czech here; despite the fact that English has a very large vocabulary, it is still a million times easier than my native language.
The Swedish do have some rather... unusual proverbs when translated and most likely taken out of context:
"Walk like the cat around hot porridge."
.
Huh?
We have a similar thing, except that "walking around hot porridge" means to try to sugar coat an unpleasant thing in a conversation. If someone tells you to "stop walking around hot porridge", it means to get to the point.
Yeah, exactly what I wanted to point out, glad someone did it already. A lot of people tend to assume that Japanese is a phonetic language like Chinese or Vietnamese just because it's an asian language, but that is so not true.
Isn't it only that the writing for Japanese is considered more difficult? So it is easier to learn how to speak in Japanese before learning how to read it?
The ''actual'' Japanese alphabet isn't actually all that hard either, seeing that it is phonetic just like ours. What makes it difficult is the fact that Japanese also uses Chinese characters, which there are thousands of. The actual tones itself are IMO not that hard to pronounce. However, my native language is Dutch, which is, when it comes to tones, also quite complicated. English is a lot smoother. So for a native English speaker it might still be pretty difficult to pronounce Japanese words.
*somehow says a yo momma joke to someone*
Is this how English feels to foreigners?
"Walk like the cat around hot porridge."
.
Huh?