Quote Originally Posted by shadowfox View Post
Yes, I believe it's a combination of the grammatical structure, and also their different tones of politeness - for instance, the way you address a friend vs a family member vs a superior vs some random person you meet in public. And then of course there are the various dialects which add their own unique subtleties and flavours. The most obvious of these is the Kansai-dialect, which is so radically different that I still can't understand it.

In the end though, the language itself fascinated me to the extent that I started studying it, but I'll go on record as saying it's one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to pick up - probably even more difficult than Chinese.
As is english extremely hard for Japanese people to master, our sentence structure in english vs. Japanese is vastly different, while my understanding is grade schooler at best (as opposed to Shadowfox).

Example:
English: The dog crossed the road
Japanese: 犬は道を渡った (Inu wa michi o watatta)

A direct translation (which is an very rough translation) into english would be: Dog the road crossed
There the verb (action, in this case the crossing) is at the end of the sentence as opposed to with the noun helping us to understand the sentence.

Apologies as I have stated above my skills are extremely limited at best.