[Barone1551]

Well the experience for everyone is different. At my school the first year (101) seems to be the same. There is a large number of students who apply for the course because like your description, it states that "no previous Japanese knowledge required". When people see this they jump right in. But quickly people drop out. Every year the number drops by at least half after the first semester of Japanese. And then another half by the next year. People look at no previous knowledge as a free pass. It is a difficult language but so are most other languages. And usually it is a harder language for people who speak English becuase it is very different from a western language. Which is why many people stick with Spanish, it has more in common with English.

With that being said I think you have to be going into it with the right mind set. From my personal experience, I didn't find Japanese extremely hard. I took Spanish first and didn't care for it to much and ended up not getting a good grade. But I attribute this mostly to the fact that I wasn't very interested in Spanish culture. I was very interested in Japanese culture. This made it very easy for me to study Japanese. I enjoyed studying Japanese, it wasn't a chore, I did it on my free time.

So I guess what I am trying to say is it has to be a personal experiment. I think like anything you learn you are going to have to enjoy it in order to make it easy. If you don't have much of an interest for Japan that learning Japanese can become a chore and therefore hard (which happens to most of the people I know who take it). If you are enjoying yourself taking it, you will do fine.