I wasn't trying to say that it should be hard to learn to read/write Japanese vertically because it is different than English. I was pointing out that learning it and becoming accustomed to it written horizontally is going to come back to bite you later. I was trying to make the point that you SHOULD be learning it properly to begin with.
At first, lacking any contact with Japanese, it shouldn't be a significant issue to learn to read and write it vertically. It is all new to you... But let us say that you study with it written horizontally and that you practice horizontally - and become fairly proficient at it that way.
This is going to make things harder by adding an extra step or two of getting used to seeing and writing it vertically, as it is the great majority of the time.
Vertical vs. horizontal isn't the issue - learning it in one way, then having to switch later on is. I don't think that vertical is inherently any more difficult than horizontal. I don't feel any particular stress at reading/writing Japanese vertically. But, I learned it in Japan, vertically. I have a feeling that if I had studied Japanese written horizontally for years, I would feel differently.
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You should be able to read that fluently with no effort. Not because it goes left to right, but because our language has associative patterns to the words themselves. That's what I think..
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Really, this is pretty much what I said with the pattern reading. If you are used to seeing certain word patterns, you are going to be very skilled at reading them when they appear in a similar pattern. This is just another point where learning incorrectly first is going to hurt you.
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read this relaxed you can and how fast and ???
Oooh it goes left to right.... ¬.¬
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Whether you are able to read it or not is not the point (everyone should be able to read it without significant difficulty as it IS English) - it is just to show how much longer it takes and how awkward it feels to read a language you have become accustomed to in one format in another. If you had, for some strange reason, learned to read and write English vertically like that it would be completely normal to you. However, you wouldn't find much English written like that, so it would be a pointless skill. In the real English speaking world, you would be forced to switch to horizontal and need to acquire that skill.
Learning Japanese written horizontally is similar. Pretty much anything short of certain mathematical and scientific publications is written vertically. No matter how good you get at reading horizontally, you are going to have to switch to reading vertically eventually... So why start out horizontal at all? It is a waste in the long run.