I am in the third year, upper-division level of Japanese right now, and it’s pretty hard grammar-wise. Note how I said upper-division level. The lower division is pretty easy as long as you study well. However, kanji is easy for me. I took a semester of Mandarin back in community college, but I don’t have the time or enough units left to take it at university (we’re not allowed to go past 225 units and I’m already near that limit). Pronunciation was easy for me since I’m Vietnamese and Vietnamese is another tonal language.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about here since Chinese is the second most spoken language in the world by over a billion speakers. Also, China is a big country. The number of Chinese students who come to the U.S. does not even make up half of the population–there are many Chinese who have never stepped outside their country at all, much like how there are a number of Americans who’ve never traveled outside the U.S.
Wrong. I personally know people who’ve studied the language in that amount of time or less, and were able to reach near-native level. It all depends on how much you’ve studied, whether you’ve made the effort to assimilate the language into your everyday life, etc. A person who absorbs themselves in the Japanese language every day (watching Japanese media, talking to Japanese friends, etc) is going to achieve fluency a lot faster than say, someone who studies the language only 15-20 minutes a day and rarely makes use of what they’ve learned outside the classroom. Actually living in the country where the language you’re learning is spoken is also going to make you fluent in that language a lot faster.
As for English being the easiest to learn, it is not. You may think it is because you’re a native English speaker, but have you ever talked to anyone whose first language isn’t English? Unless their first language is similar or related to English, many of them will say that English is a hard language for them to learn and master.
@PolarMama: Off the top of my head, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCI, UC Davis, Yale, Harvard, Brown, University of Hawaii, and Cornell are some universities with an East Asian Studies program. I was formerly an East Asian Studies major (I go to UC Davis), but I recently switched to Japanese because I decided I’d rather major in Japanese and minor in EAS. The EAS major here at UC Davis is rather small, though, so it’s hard finding other people who are in the same major. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people ask me, “what’s that?” when I told them my major was East Asian Studies. Of the UCs, UC Berkeley and UCLA have the strongest EAS program from what I’ve heard.