The Japanese Project Part I

Holy crap learning Japanese is hard.

So, there are four different alphabets. One is based in the Latin alphabet, which is nice, but it's only used to communicate with stupid gaijin like myself. There are two phonetic alphabets, one of which is only used for words imported from other languages. (After what date, I'm not sure). But the main alphabet is pretty much only used in kindergarten books, since the inscrutable kanji make up most of the written language.

To add to the fun, there are four different levels of formality in speech, and the grammatical rules apparently change for each. Awesome.