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Ahh. I see you have learned Japanese. Well done!

(Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)

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Isn’t there a ton of drift, though? Yes, spelling in Japanese is easier than English, but listening and speaking exercises seem just as important if not more important than they are for English. Otherwise you’ll sound like a cat got your tongue and the person you’re speaking to will reply with にゃんですか？

I'm not sure if there's grounds to say that the importance of speaking/listening exercises is different from any other language. Regardless of what language you're learning, you'll probably sound like a fool if you can even spit out any words at all if you don't practice speaking.

I just wanted to make a punny joke. “Nyan desu ka?” is a play on “Nani desu ka?” which basically means “what?”. And nyan is the Japanese word for a cat’s meow.

Not until japan learns how to put consonants next to each other.

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