Trying to learn Japanese as a native english speaker gave me a lot of respect for Japanese (and I think Asians in general, since I suspect other languages in the area are more similar to each other than they are to European languages) people who learn to speak even broken English. Our languages are so different, from the alphabets used, to the way words are formed, to sentence structure, and even having formality baked into things like verb conjugation and titles for everyone based on what your relationship is with them (with different defaults based on how the relationship starts).

So assuming going from Japanese to English is a similar difficulty, it doesn't surprise me that they might have a similar respect for those who make an attempt to learn their language.

After a year of learning (though with admittedly varying levels of motivation), I can still only pick out some words while listening or reading and can barely form my own sentences with a very limited vocabulary. Though I think part of that is duolingo particularly sucking for english - > japanese. My year sub expires tomorrow but duolingo never even hinted at formality being baked into the language and treats kanji as after thoughts.

What resources did you find btw?