The education ministry's proposal to establish hub schools staffed by special instructors to help foreign students learn Japanese is sorely needed. The number of foreign students attempting to do so had risen to about 37,000 in 2014, a 160 percent increase from a decade earlier. But the case for American students is particularly compelling.
That's because Japanese and English have very little in common. Japanese has three alphabets, a very different grammar and syntax, and complex levels of formality. There are thousands of characters to master. Compounding the difficulty is that multiple words exist for counting, depending on the size and shape involved.
It's little wonder, therefore, that the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State ranks Japanese as even more challenging than the other five languages in the top category of difficulty. The institute estimates that it takes a minimum of 2,200 hours to learn Japanese. By comparison, it takes about 600 hours to learn Spanish, French or Italian.