#lang ref

Most southern state names are from the Native Americans! Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Missouri are from past tribes that lived there. The eastern states come from english Nobles, like the Carolinas and Georgia.

see Japanese would be a living nightmare ofr me to learn, yet its on my list of things I want desperately.

okay the thing is

here's a comparison of japanese versus french

the pros to learning japanese are:

japanese is spoken the way it is written so the only thing you need to worry about in terms of pronunciation is getting the sounds and stresses right

unlike french where literally nothing is spoken and written the same way and spellings are a nightmare as a result

japanese is also a concise language, somewhat like spanish, where pronouns are mostly done away with in informal conversations

also things don't have genders unlike french so that is a huge huge relief if you ask me

verbs are for the most part not conjugated according to subject which makes things hard to understand sometimes but is a plus for learners

there are really only two tenses (no future tense as such)

the sentence structure is actually very sensible though it takes some time to get used to

cons of learning japanese

kanji

kanji

kanji

~2000 kanji just to read newspapers and signboards

also two sets of alphabets besides kanji (which don't take very long but still) called hiragana and katakana

the problem with not learning kanji (which some people do) is that japanese is a sound-poor language and infested with homonyms so without the visual distinction afforded by kanji you'll remember jack shit

if you only speak english the sentence structure will take some getting used to (luckily my mother tongue uses a somewhat similar structure -_-;)

several registers of speech depending on politeness levels and situations

infinitives of verbs are often irregular and not very easy to learn (but then french is definitely worse in that regard)