It's not too hard if you can practice everyday. It's easier than say Russian, Viet Namese, probably even easier than Polish or Hungarian.

Anime Dad : Thankie ^0^ Nice to see you too! It's good to be back again, hopefully I can get some good dorama in before I'm back in with the learning! =D

You have the added bonus at Uni of being tested on it too ^^; it pressurizes you to learn! We have a test in Japanese every Monday on what we learned the previous week, which usually is about 40 new words, pages full of new grammar, 13 new kanji etc. and they wonder why I don't spend time going over my business notes I revise like the clappers to pass those tests as all of them count for 50% of my mark >< luckily I've done well so far... yay =D

I'm not sure having learned another language before is much help. I had done 5 years of French back when I was at school... but I had been out of school for about 6 years before I came to Uni. I haven't really used any of the practices I used to learn French, because let's face it neither language is alike

But yeah it is definitely easier learning in an institute, I found it really easy to get distracted at home when I tried teaching myself, also sometimes I was never 100% I was saying it right or even using it in the right context. I think you really need to have someone teach you particles at least, when I tried myself they confused me to no end, but now they make sense... well most of them!
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Hmmm... Well, like everybody said, it's always difficult to learn a foreign language. Even more, if you learn it on your own.
For me it's easier, because I can already speak a various amount of languages, or I'm studying them.
In my case, I grew up with German and Turkish. Then I learned French (but I suck at it XD), English, Latin and now I'm studying Japanese on my own.
Well, it's more or less on my own, because I have a japanese friend who helps me a lot and shows me where I make mistakes. I was never bad at japanese and could communicate well enogh before (otherwise I couldn't have gotten to know her, because she only speaks japanese), but it's always better if you have a "mentor" who corrects you ^^.

Jaa mata~
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Speaking Turkish is definitely an advantage when you study Japanese. The grammar is basically the same and Japanese pronunciation is also no problem. I grew up with German and Turkish myself, and learnt English as first foreign language, then Japanese. Think I'm gonna aim for arabic next.

No matter what language you study, its important to start thinking in that language as soon as possible. The longer you make sentences based on a translation from your mother tongue in your head, the harder it will get for you to become truly fluent and reduce certain grammatical errors.

Like a few people have posted before, I too was coming from a latin based language as my only other foreign language. Learning any language is not hard, just time consuming. If you aren't willing to put the time, it will be hard then. Asian languages are more time consuming. Once you put the time into it, it isn't all that difficult.

It depends, if you want to just learn to speak (ie not read & write) it would probably be easier. Learning an entirely new character set (actually 3) makes it so much more complex

Learning hiragana and katakana seems hard at first, but after looking at the Thai alphabet they now seem really easy...

Then there's this: http://www.tofugu.com/2012/08/27/how-to-stay-motivated-when-learning-japanese/

No, Japanese is probably the easiest East Asian language to learn.
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