hardest part about learning japanese? probably the fact that, aside from plenty of english loan words, it's a pretty isolated language that doesn't take elements from too many other languages, unlike English which is pretty much a frankenstein beast of different languages lol. in this respect, the grammar, sentence structure, and many many words are completely different from what I'm used to seeing in latin-derived languages. buuut that's exactly one of the reasons why I decided to go for japanese. it's so foreign to me to make it a challenge but there's tons of japanese media readily available to the western world that i can get my hands on (thanks, anime!) as for what I'm excited for for when I eventually do visit japan, probably the food. food is good. totally the food. こんにちわ!元気ですか lol! i dont think i could ever imagine getting back into comics again at this point. it's been waay too long for me and i'm prob rusty as heck haha I use google translate but rarely ever for actual translations lol. it's got a handy feature for when you're translating japanese into other languages, you can type the romaji and it'll automatically transcribe it into hiragana/katakana/kanji so that's super useful when you want to type out stuff. also using google translate for japanese can be pretty... weird. it's such a contextual language that usually cuts out words that are obvious to the listener so computerized translators, being as limited as they are, won't be able to pick up on the more subtle areas of a language. there's also the fact that the minimum requirements you need to have a complete grammatically correct sentence in japanese is a single verb so yeah there's that lol