Just for you Superfrank!
English - Fluent
Irish - Basic
German - Basic (used to be half decent, but never spoke a word since the leaving cert) (der die das - just shoot me)
Japanese - Advanced (Speaking) Intermediate (Reading) Lower Intermediate (Writing)
Japanese is relatively easy to learn to speak, but truly brutal to learn to write.
As a language teacher, I've learned that the difficulty in learning a language relates mainly to two things - irregularities and unfamiliar tenses. As an example, Japanese students simply cannot understand any perfect tense because they don't exist in Japanese (nor does the future tense, surprisingly).
If I had a yen for every time I'd heard a student say "go to shopping", I'd be a rich man.
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