>>56703508US foreign service institute that trains civil servants for the state dept. ranks languages by difficulty for a native English speaker to reach proficiency.
Japanese is in the most difficult category:
>Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)>Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakersWithin this group, which includes also both forms of chinese, korean and Arabic, Japanese is considered more difficult than the others in this same category.
Contrariwise this holds true for Japanese learning English: it is just as difficult for a nip to learn English as it is for an eng speaker to learn nip.
