The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.

I am from India and I have basic familiarity with Japanese and Sanskrit. Both languages rely heavily on context. Since knowledge was mostly passed from master through disciple the information is compressed into smaller sentences easy to memorize. The full meaning was always conveyed through the human interaction. English on other hand seems to have grown during industrial revolution where mass producing information and passing it to people who may no have human being to explain it around was very important. Over years English has evolved to describe all possible information even without the context.

I see western scholars translating Sanskrit word "Namaste" as "Hello" but in reality it is "I bow to you" something that Indians might have well forgotten but they are surely to know the context and a elderly person will not do a "Namaste" to a child. We bow to elders not younger ones.

Similarly Japanse phrase of Itadakemas might be translated merely as "I take" but the English translation does not do justice to it. As an Indian I think I total understand the sentiments behind the phrase.

So I think it would be a mistake to call Japanese people retarded without fully understanding their culture.

> Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level.

> Kids in Spain are reading Kiss of the Spiderwoman , kids in America Harry Potter, and kids in Japan . . . Naruto, the adolescent ninja. What’s Japan famous for? Literature? Movies? Music? Web design? Please. Comic books. Anime. Illustrations everywhere.

Right, I'm guessing they haven't read Tales of Genji or Saikaku or watched many of the films out of Japan in the Criterion collection. But let's dismiss an entire culture and history because of the popularity of anime (which, by the way, is not just for kids, but that's a different topic).

> Japanese people themselves are aware of this; if not individually, then at least as a group. In recent years a flood of new words has entered the language, and guess what, they’re all written with the Japanese phonetic alphabet, katakana.

And that's because they can't read it? WTF. Katakana is pretty. It's marketing. Sometimes Japanese poetry (yes it exists) uses katakana for style and emphasis. I don't claim to know how Japanese marketing works but you, author, don't either.

> Nobody bothers to make kanji for stuff anymore, because half the time, no one can read it.

What? Even if you're being hyperbolic, that's still too much. Yes, there's a lot of difficult kanji even for native speakers. For foreigners like me, it's the biggest barrier to learning it. But to claim that native born speakers can't recognize half the words in common use...

> Ever wonder why Japanese people have such trouble learning English? Just look at how well they speak their own language.

Again, even if you move past the reductive reasoning and general racist stereotyping, it's just plainly wrong. Even in a logical level. Do you really think a nation of people who speak a language can't do it well? Why do they choose that language then?

Seriously, I get "skepticism", but wtf HN. If it looks racist and smells racist, let's not just skid past it and just inquiry about "supporting data".

That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are plenty of features in Japanese that make learning Chinese (or vice versa) easier than Mandarin/English. Assuming by "borrowed words" you're referring to onyomi (which is a huge deal in learning languages) there's still the fact that in both Japanese and Chinese (off the top of my head) there is:

- no verbal conjugation

- no genders for nouns

- monosyllabic sounds

- gender ambiguity in pronouns

- no definite article

I'd also argue the concept of tenses is more similar between Japanese and Chinese than Chinese and English.

If you start factoring in things like onyomi, it's a whole different ball-game, and anecdotally I and other people familiar with South-East Chinese dialects (e.g. fujianhua/chaozhouhua) have noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Japanese and Chinese - which makes learning new vocabulary way easier see [0].

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-Chinese-dialect-is-the-most-simil...