How would you (re-)rank the language difficulty list for native English speakers if you broke the list into separate categories for Listening/Speaking vs Reading/Writing (as opposed to combining all the categories together). For example: I wonder where Japanese ranks for listening/speaking.

So, I've seen those lists that rank the estimated difficulty levels of the various languages for native English speakers to learn in terms of average total hours it takes for a student to become level-3 fluent or what have you.

Inevitably, Japanese tends to get ranked as one of if not THE hardest language for native English speakers to learn out of all the languages.

BUT...

When it comes to Japanese, the thing(s) they always mention as far as why they rank it as so ultra-difficult always has to do with the reading/writing aspect, because it uses characters rather than a roman alphabet, and worse yet, uses like 3 different sets of characters/syllabaries, not even just 1.

But, let's say a person had no interest in being literate in a language, and just wanted to be able to speak it and understand other people speaking it (to be able to converse with people in that language, or watch movies in it, etc).

In that scenario, I'm guessing Japanese would get re-ranked as quite a bit easier than it gets listed on the combined-list rankings. The pronunciation aspect seems like one of the easiest of all the languages, from what I gather (unlike Cantonese, which I think is supposed to be extraordinarily difficult and complicated by comparison).

Sorry if this question is a bit weird, but hopefully you guys understand what I'm trying to ask. Thanks!

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