It can be tough, but not too bad. I took 4 years in HS and another year (more a refresher course than anything) in college. It takes awhile to get decent with it. Part of that, is because unlike latin based languages (English, Spanish, French etc.) you have to spend considerable amounts of time learning the Japanese character set. 46 Hiragana, 46 Katakana and over 2000 commonly used Kanji.
In my classes we did the Hiragana and Katakana the first year and about 50-100 Kanji each year after that. Ganbatte ne!
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