Japanese is a very intricate language. My mother lived there for 10 years, and she’s going back to visit for six weeks. She’s taking Japanese courses, to get her Japanese back in shape. this is after living there for 10 years and being immersed in it. Granted she hasn’t been living there for a long long time, but Japanese is such a complex language, if you’re not living there, it takes forever to learn completely. Or you may never learn it completely.

My daughter study Japanese, and that was her major in college along with international business she was gonna be an interpreter. She was there for a year, and to this day still she says there’s so much to learn about Japanese.

I think it may be the same for a lot of the Asian languages. Like you said… There are just sounds and things we’ve just never heard of, or the intricacies of how the language was written with the kanji - makes it even more complicated.

However, I think that Japanese flow so much more fluently and more beautifully then Korean. But they do sound a lot of like to somebody who would not know either of them. Lol