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Now I wanna know what they said.

No no you whip the poor while they work on plantations. You hunt the homeless for sport.

How do you know I’m already in over my head?

I actually hear occasional similarities between Japanese and Cantonese. For example: “world” is “世界”, “Sai Gai” in Cantonese, and its “Sekai” in Japanese.

Wow, that’s a lot closer than the Mandarin Shi Jie. Anyway that’s one of those Sino-Japanese words; they’re kind of like the English equivalent of French loanwords so there’s a whole lot of them. Also I guess I have to take back my “it won’t help you with listening” bit if Sino-Japanese words are that close to their Cantonese counterparts. Either you drew the Chinese lottery or Mandarin is just whack.

Minor nitpick: While Chinese fluency will put you in a marginally better position when learning Japanese compared to a monolingual English speaker, it’s really nothing significant. Doesn’t really go into the same category as Korean, which is indeed very similar to Japanese. Additionally the only famous language that substantially helps with Japanese learning is Korean, with an honorable mention going to Turkish.

For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms.

I think you mean Wago and Kango counting, in which case Kango isn’t irregular at all. There are sound changes, but they almost all follow a handful of basic rules. Wago is plenty irregular, but it also stops at ten and is only used for a handful of things. It’s messed up, sure, but not the end of the world.

And don’t get me started on the calendar.

The calendar? Their months are literally just firstmonth, secondmonth, thirdmonth, etc.

My weeb ass: My time has come.

I did it, and for the record my native language has absolutely nothing in common with Japanese. I started with Duolingo and kept at it until I could power through easy manga, at which point and I started doing that. The good news is that if you can power through the early bits, your entertainment (assuming it’s in Japanese) will supplement and eventually replace your studying. Here are the things I think I did right:

1. Be willing to invest serious time into studying and/or consuming comprehensible material (also known as immersion). At what point it becomes “not worth it” is up to you, but I’d aim for at least an hour a day.

2. Watch anime often and attempt to understand what you’re hearing (this is separate from studying). You’ll fail most of the time at first, but this keeps your ear open so you improve your listening without doing much if any extra work. It also helps you keep track of your progress, since the better you get the more you’ll understand. I took a half-year break and when I came back I found my Japanese had improved at least in part because I was watching anime in the interim.

3. Don’t fall for the studying trap. At some point, and probably earlier than you expect, you’ll have to drop actual studying material and focus your efforts on immersion. I started by reading a manga called Yotsubato after getting to conditionals on Duolingo, but really any manga with furigana works. If you find something other than manga you like better then go for that, but you need something and it needs to at least keep you on your toes language-wise and still be ultimately comprehensible. Humans learn language by recognizing patterns within copious volumes of content, not by rationally analyzing those patterns; that latter stuff is for linguists.

4. Keep challenging yourself. It’s easy to think you’re not ready to advance to the next level, but you should accept that the transition will be painful anyway and often try your hand at more advanced material (meaning immersion material here, as I said don’t bother with advanced studying material). In my case, I thought my Japanese was plateauing after sticking with one thing for too long, but after I read my first light novel I improved ridiculously fast. We’re talking serious improvement in a matter of weeks here. You’re likely to underestimate the level of material you can digest, so you should take that into account when making decisions.

Note regarding your native language: I speak basic Chinese and Chinese and Japanese are different enough that you’ll be almost no better than an English native speaker when it comes to fundamentally understanding the language. However, the writing system and the prevalence of Sino-Japanese words mean that you’ll have a leg up in guessing the meaning of words you don’t know when reading, especially after you learn to reverse engineer character simplifications. For example, you’ll see something like 解説 and be like “oh that’s just 解说.” At least coming from the other direction this is super convenient, but it’s obviously no substitute for actually learning the language and it won’t help you at all when it comes to listening (this is the case for Mandarin, but apparently Sino-Japanese words are pronounced reasonably close to their Cantonese counterparts). You also get the joy of seeing exactly how the Japanese butchered Chinese words, so… uh… good luck. You’ll have fun with 样/様. On the plus side you won’t be like “what the hell is this” when you run into counters, but the counting system still has “fun” stuff for you. So to directly answer your questions:

YMMV, but I don’t think it’s hard at all. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s no more or less difficult than English.

If you can commit then no, but obviously yes if you give up in three weeks.

This isn’t as important a decision as you’d expect, but Duolingo will do fine.

PS: There’s more and more anime with good dubs these days.

The Great Vowel Shift. English writing was sensible in the early 14th century around the time of Chaucer, but then shit got out of whack speaking-wise and the writing system was never adjusted to reconcile the difference. So you can blame the Black Death I guess.

Hey, us Eastern weebs do it too!

Depending on the proficiency level you want, but if we include immersion here (which we should as studying per se won’t get you very far on its own) then you will need a couple of years. Unless you’re studying and immersing full-time, there’s no way to speak a language proficiently in less than that.

Everything about the language is needlessly complicated.

I mean, there is no language that isn’t needlessly complicated. At least Japanese doesn’t have gendered nouns.

Correct, that’s why the entirety of Europe is made of mercantile strong monarchies still.

Uh… these were not toppled with democracy FYI.

They become evil monsters.

Most, sure, but far from all. The list of historical benevolent dictators isn’t very long, but it’s not short either.

When asking a question like this, it’s good form to edit the answer into the OP.

There are plain old anime piracy sites, for both downloading and streaming, if you don’t want the headache.

If the devs don’t give it away for free and the distributors don’t give it away for free then you’re getting files from a third party which has risks associated. That’s literally the only reason not to pirate now.

You sound like you’ve never actually talked to someone who plays indie games. “I wish I could pirate this but I can’t” is a virtually unheard of sentiment, because in the first place anyone who wants to pirate already does. There are plenty of safe and trusted piracy sites. The vast majority of games can be obtained for free, yet people pay for them anyway.

Indie game Devs who make money do so because people like their games, and that’s it.

I mean, that’s true but it doesn’t contradict what I said. “I like this game” -> “I want the people who made this game to succeed and make more games” and/or “the people who made this game deserve compensation for their work” -> “I should buy this game rather than pirate it” is how the logic goes. I mean, you’ll see this in any indie game fandom.

Counter-question: Why would you buy it?

For the same reason anyone buys games now: Because they believe developers deserve compensation for their work and/or to support the devs. Anyone who doesn’t think so can and does already pirate, and the thriving indie dev industry is thriving despite the existence of a completely free alternative.

Why would they even make it while starving?

Because they believe they can make money. See above for why they’d think so.

Turning that into a creator economy reliant on donations is silly.

That’s pretty much what it already is. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay can get the game in question without paying; it’s just that plenty of people do decide to pay despite the existence of this option. I mean, hell, pretty much any game you coild possibly want exists on any of the dozens of pirated game sites. It’s impossible for anauthorized corporate resales to even attempt to compete with this.

Point being: If you’re an indie game dev who is able to make money from their games, you’re making that money because your players support you and want you to succeed snd make more games, not because state violence has successfully restricted access to channels that will mske you money. Therefore, an increase in channels that don’t mske you money wouldn’t compete with channels that do make you money, because making you money isn’t a coincidence; it’s the whole point.