[Aniki]

Originally Posted by MMM

Easier and faster to learn for who? How could you say English would be easier for young Japanese to learn than Japanese would be?I have never heard a Japanese person say "English is so easy to learn". It requires a completely different way of thinking than Japanese, which is why Japanese is hard for English speakers to learn. It goes both ways.

MMM, I'm not the one who should be reminding you that Japanese requires to learn 1,900 kanji + hiragana and katakana, while the English alphabet only 26 letters and that's just the writing system. You still think that to the Japanese people Japanese language would be easier to learn then English?
And just because you haven't heard a Japanese person say that "English is so easy to learn", it doesn't tell anything. Japanese is almost hard for every Westerner (only Finnish would find Japanese easy because both languages have similar sentence structure), but it depends on persons will and effort. For one person Japanese might be hard to learn, for another it might be easy. Same goes for any language, no matter who's learning it and the way of thinking doesn't play a huge part in it.

Originally Posted by MMM

What history do you have to back it up?

I’ll give you the short story. After the establishing of the USSR Russian language became an “official” language in all of the Soviet Union and was thought in schools, used in media, etc. And while it was an official language of the Soviet Union in all but formal name, all national languages were proclaimed equal.
In that period a lot of Russian loan words were acquired by other languages because of every day use, causing harm to them and after the fall of USSR when all countries got their independence the whole damage became seen. Some countries are still having problems with eliminating the damage, and the problems mostly consists in people who got used to it in time, and don’t understand what’s the problem with using Russian words with their native language.
Now, I'm NOT saying that the same thing is going to happen with Japan if English is going to be made and official language. I'm only trying to prove that if a foreign language "officially" steps into a country, in time, it will cause a lot damage to the native language.

Originally Posted by MMM

I guarantee you a lot more of Japanese young people participate in tea ceremony and flower arranging clubs than dress up in cosplay.

True, I'm not going to argue with that. Maybe I was overreacting about this, but I didn't make my assumptions from out of nowhere. Recently there was a show about the Japanese who are living here and they told that with each generation of Japanese young people show less interest to traditions and that is slowly becoming a problem in Japan. I've also read somewhere about it on the net.