I'm one of those typical Americans who speaks everything from English to English, but as a traveler, I often run across other languages. Spanish impresses me as the easiest to learn and once learned, it could be helpful in learning more languages. Portuguese for example is very similar. So is Italian. The Hawaiian language uses the same vowell sounds as Spanish.

I find it interesting that people who speak several languages often carry on conversations in two or three languages all at the same time. As an example, my daughter, who speaks mainly English, but can also struggle along in Spanish and understands a little French, was on a cruise with her husband who is fluent in English and Spanish. They met a couple from Brazil, and as often happens on cruise ships, they quickly became friends. I asked her what language they used in conversation she said that she was speaking English, her husband Spanish and the Brazilians were using mostly Portuguese. She said it was no problem.
Howard
> > > It's not just Japanese, it's a whole lot of languages. Finnish, German, and Spanish come right to my mind, and I'm sure there are many more. I would guess the majority of the world's languages have close to 1-to-1 correspondence between written and spoken letters. But because English does not, English speakers have trouble learning these languages.
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> > What native English speakers have trouble learning to pronounce written Spanish? We may have trouble pronouncing the sounds in Spanish that we don't have (e.g. the Spanish R sounds), but I've never heard of anyone complaining that we can't figure it out because the orthography is too straightforward. "This is too simple! I can't figure it out!" Come on.
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> > Part of the reason Japanese seems so easy to pronounce is because it's not a very phonetically diverse language. There is a very small phoneme set, the vowels are pretty much always pronounced identically, and there are only five vowels.
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> > It's also worth noting that Japanese is really only easy to pronounce when it's been transcribed into the Latin alphabet -- actually learning to read written Japanese is probably as hard or harder as learning to read written English, since you just have to memorize thousands of unique characters that usually have zero relationship to their pronunciation. If I were to transcribe spoken English words into a phonetic alphabet, it would also be easy to pronounce.
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> Well, maybe I misunderstood. If a native English speaker actually learns a foreign language, I'm sure he/she will be able to learn its pronunciation, at least if it's as simple as that of Finnish, German, Spanish and Japanese. But if the native English speaker doesn't *know* the language, trying to pronounce it might be difficult. Not so much in Spanish, but I have heard of English-speakers having difficulty in pronouncing German, and Finnish is a different story all together. Of all the languages I've ever learned, Finnish comes the closest to a one-to-one correspondence between writing and pronunciation. In fact, as a child, I was hard pressed to find any exceptions in Finnish pronunciation. The best I could come up with was "ng", which surprisingly isn't pronounced as "n" and "g" separately.
> Although I speak German fluently, and have a passing knowledge of Spanish, I am not very sure about Japanese pronunciation because I do not understand any Japanese and do not personally know any Japanese people. It is just my impression of what I've learned from the Internet.