I got fascinated by the Japanese language when I fell in love with Miyazaki's animation works. Though I have no foundation of Japanese languages, the beginning wasn't tough for me as I am a native Chinese speaker. It's interesting that I'm actually learning Elementary Korean simultaneously to fully understand East Asian cultures. The language structure of Korean and Japanese are quite similar that it's quite easy for me to understand the position of Japanese particles.
The difficult part was that recognizing hiragana accurately was a lengthy process from me. It was also a bit tricky to memorize certain exception of number expressions for inquiry of time, price and age. Pronouncing hiragana directly could be a bit slow and I will definitely kept practicing my speaking skills along with daily writing practices.
Katakana seems to be more difficult to learn because there are many resemblances both within Katakana and between Hiragana and Katakana. What about Kanji? My feeling is that, as a Chinese speaker, it's tricky to see the different meanings and usages of them in the two languages. In addition, some Kanjis are different from their Chinese counterparts, and some are in the traditional rather than the simplified form. Even for someone like me majoring in Chinese history, writing traditional Chinese characters is not easy though I can read them.
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