Kevin Cole asked Eva Vanrell:

As a Japanophile, do you study the language? I used to think Japanese was enormously complicated compared to English. But what little I have studied tells me (and you should tell me if I'm wrong) that while Japanese is quite different in structure to Japanese, it's also much more consistent as far as grammatical rules are concerned. What do you think?

Eva Vanrell Hi Kevin. Thanks for your question. My study of the Japanese language has, unfortunately, been very limited (something I hope to remedy in the future), so I don't really know enough about the grammatical rules to be able to comment on them. What I can say is that I listen to spoken Japanese on a regular basis and the aspects I've picked up on about the language feel very familiar (comfortable) to me. I don't know if that has anything to do with similarities to any of the languages I speak (English and Spanish) or simply the length of time I've been exposed to the language. I do think the reason people tend to describe it as complicated has a lot to do with their writing system, because it mixes Kanji, Hiragana (a syllabary for native words) and Katakana (a syllabary for foreign words and names), and sometimes even romaji (romanized Japanese).

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