> > When I lived there, most expats, if out of nothing but sheer necessity,
> nailed the hiragana and katakana fairly quickly. Kanji were a bear for
them,
> though not really an issue for me due to previous heavy lifting I'd done
> with Chinese. What I found difficult with Japanese was the politesse
> hardwired into the system. Since there are *two* axes of politeness
degree,
> one toward the person you're talking to, one toward the person/thing
you're
> talking about, it gets tricky. And yet, that's the charm of the system;
> never in English have I been able to set the atmosphere of a room,
> *grammatically* as well as through word choice, as I have in Japanese
> ("would like" just doesn't cut it). Once you finally get it, the subtlety
is
> a delight.
>
> Kou

Definitely true: but my Japanese teacher used to say that the giver-receiver
verbs (which vary for the speaker and listener's status) are the hardest
part of the language, but I didn't find them so, in fact, I found the
distinctions between them quite interesting...

Imperative