<p>It’s nowhere near a thousand times easier than Spanish, it’s really not that hard. You will start off learning hiragana (syllabic script) and romaji (English syllabic script, very very easy) and then katakana (for foreign words). Once you have those two down (romaji is a given if you can write in English) you can write anything in Japanese. This probably takes around a month or so in a classroom is my guess. Along the way you will also learn some very basic Japanese vocabulary and grammar.</p>
<p>After a while kanji will be introduced, the Chinese characters used by the Japanese language. This can become a bit harder as you are now getting into the phase where you are increasing the unique characters from ~50 to hundreds. Additionally, you will start to form more complex sentences and the sentence structure of Japanese is not like English. This might sound challenging but it’s really not that bad as long as you do the one thing that you need to do in all classes to do well - stay on top of it, study, and don’t fall behind.</p>
<p>When you graduate from college it will most likely be substantially harder to learn it. You will now have a full time job 40+ hours per week as well as other responsibilities and your entire life will no longer be centrally located around a single point, the school campus, so you will be driving or taking public transportation a lot more thus having less free time.</p>