The Japanese language is, of course, very different from English — about as different as you can get, as languages go. Instead of a subject/verb/object word order, it’s subject/object/verb, although the subject is frequently left off if it’s clear from the context to make things extra-challenging for foreigners — or so it seems at times. Japanese is an agglutinating language, which means more information like past tense or passive voice is stored in the verb form, but the upside is no helping verbs like “he would have been able to go” to memorize. One of the first things any student of the language has to get used to is grammatical particles, short “markers” which indicate parts of the sentence, such as wa and ga (the nuance-filled “topic” and “subject” markers), o (the object marker), and so on, which are not particularly difficult, just new. Then there’s the question particle ka, which goes on the end of sentences and indicates that the statement just made is a question, e.g. Bento o tabemasu ka? “Will you eat your bento?” I found breaking sentences down into almost mathematical formulas that I could memorize then switch words in and out of helped me get past the different-ness relatively easily.
Japanese grammar is very different from English. Not really harder, just different.
