Congrats to Taisie and well done on your fine achievements in the various languages you have `mastered`. Your argument is that learning Japanese should be as simple as learning ABC. Now whilst German, Spanish, English etc. may all have one alphabet. Japanese however has 3 alphabets, being kanji, hiragana and katakana.

For conversational Japanese, one doesn`t have to learn all three alphabets, maybe 2 (hiragana & katakana) is enough although the grammer is quite the opposite to English so you have to virtually reprogram your brain when switching between the two languages. But for those who has to study in Japanese, the minimum is to memorize at least 2000 kanjis (Chinese characters), to read at least 90% of a Japanese newspaper and some text books, one needs to know at least 3000 kanjis.

Japanese themselves studied 2000 kanjis by the time they completed their senior high school and most university students still can`t pronounce some kanji`s in their given contexts. I guess, the point here is that it may be easy to learn to speak the basics but to actually read text books and attend lectures in Japanese, one needs more than just `????????????????(Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu.) or ?????????????????(Tsutsushinde shinnen no oyorokobi o moushiagemasu.) both meaning `happy new yr!!
or Feliz Año Nuevo!! to our Spanish friends..

merry x-mas & barava happy new yr every wantoks from around the globe!