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Go back 30–40 years and the proposition of an American learning Japanese probably sounds a lot less ridiculous.

But Americans still didn’t learn Japanese en mass when it looked like Japanese manufacturing was going to conquer the world. Just like they didn’t learn Chinese.

Learning a new language as an adult is incredibly difficult. I have learned Spanish to a basic conversational level and it has been a massive struggle for me.

My Swiss and German friends seem to pick up new languages super easily though. Likely this is because they learned a second, third, or even fourth language as children.

So, not impossible but it is good to acknowledged that this isn’t an easy thing to do and likely would be a generational shift kind of thing.

American's stubborn insistence on only knowing one language aside, my point is that learning Japanese would've been reasonable perhaps even en vogue.

Japanese is a relatively difficult language to learn.

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