Japanese is reportedly a difficult language for westerners to master. Written Japanese uses four different scripts, including Romani which is uses western script to write Japanese words. Kanji uses over 40,000 different Chinese characters.

All Japanese learn English as a foreign language at school, so most Japanese nationals can at least understand some English.

Although it is helpful to learn some Japanese if you are going to live in Japan, many expatriates live there successfully for many years with little or no command of the Japanese language.