I can't believe any English speaker would rank Spanish harder to learn than Japanese.

According to the US military, it takes 64 weeks to learn Japanese as a native English speaker as it would take 26 to learn Spanish as a native English speaker.

Say what you want about the US military, but they likely have a lot of data in learning how long it takes for native English speakers to learn other languages.

spanish could be considered harder because it has a shit ton of personal pronouns and a lot of verb conjugations based on formality, time, and a lot of other shit, so you need to remember a lot these which makes it quite hard. japanese has some verb conjugation but it's way easier in comparison to spanish. i say that if you'd remove kanji from the formulation spanish is harder, otherwise yeah, that complicates things a lot in japanese.

Japanese because Kanji which is still used everywhere doesn't give information on how it's pronounced. Learning to read and especially write them is much more difficult than Spanish spelling rules. Same problem as the language Kanji came from, Chinese. Source: Chinese immigrant who's fluent in speaking Chinese but can't read it. Japanese does have an advantage over Chinese in that it actually has character sets that give pronunciation information though. Presumably you can at least just write in one of the two phonetic character sets and people will understand you okay but I'm not quite sure how the combination of character sets work in practice.

I think the hardest part of Spanish is conjugations, instead of adding a word they modify the verb itself in ways you have to get used to however, AFAIK pronunciation is quite consistent

I think it’s not as much difficulty rather than the fun in learning a language. I recently took a year of French (A1) and am a couple months into a Japanese course, and I have a lot more fun with Japanese, even though it should be harder. There’s a lot of fun in learning katakana and hiragana, and sites like Wanikani help make kanji learning really fun too.

That being said, yes the progress is a lot slower in Japanese. In French I could make some pretty long complex sentences relatively quickly. In Japanese it’s still things like “Mary ate breakfast in a cafe and watched a movie with a friend on Saturday” after 5 months. In my French class we did stuff like that maybe 2 months in (though we stayed in the present tense a lot longer).

Overall I think if you have fun the difficulty doesn’t matter. Good luck if you have to learn a language you don’t like though.

Learned some Spanish in high school and went beyond curriculum because I really like linguistics. Started learning Japanese in middle school, fell off, and picked back up on it a few months ago.

Japanese is definitely more difficult for the average native English speaker.

With virtually no languages beyond dialect distinction can you take an idea from one and directly translate it to the other and be fully fluent—however your rate of success doing so is going to be higher between English and Spanish than it'd be between English and Japanese.

I will say, however, as a native American English speaker, I have an easier time listening to Japanese than I do Latin American Spanish.

I saw something recently that made the argument that English has structures that act like kanji as well. The same is true for Spanish.

Consider the glyph 1. By itself you'd read it 'one', but then what about 1st, where it is read 'fir-'? And then 10 and 11 don't match either of those, or each other.