Consider the needlessly complicated to be applied on top of a general baseline of needlessly complicated that applies to any language.

While they don't have gendered nouns, they have something equally unnerving for the beginner learner. Their noun classes evolve mostly around the nature of shapes and sizes, which becomes an issue the moment you need to count anything. For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms. And don't get me started on the calendar. English is relatively unsophisticated by comparison.

I mean, I thought Japanese was super straightforward compared to English. I’ve been speaking English for three goddamn decades and I:

• still occasionally flip my Rs and Ls when I’m going fast and being careless
• have to pause a beat before saying “Canada” to make sure I don’t use the rhythm structure/emphasis pattern for “banana”
• sometimes just get really lost when I make a complicated sentence and have to stop and try again
• can barely remember that English speakers take pills, and not drink them (you don’t chew them, for fucks sake! Just say drink!)
• fucking hate that OUGH has more readings than most kanji
• realized a couple years into learning English, that English has twenty-six radicals, stacked horizontally, and they make a word, and that word may not be pronounced how the radicals suggest, and it’s best just to memorize 116,000 kanji-words (and you English speakers bitch about kanji so endlessly, not understanding the sheer absolute fucking monster you came from)

toki pona li pona.