Frisian (Native)
Dutch
English
German (Read/Understand)

English, rusty German, less rusty Spanish, Nahuatl, smidgens of Welsh and Russian. I can muddle through reading the sort of French that tends to crop up in English novels from the first half of the 20th century and menus.

To those of you who are learning Asian languages, I have a couple of questions for you:

How do you tell the characters apart? How do you read someone's handwriting in that language? Because we all know someone with crappy penmanship...

I know these questions may sound dumb but I just fail to see too many differences between some of the characters. It's even worse when I hear someone having a conversation in an Asian language. I can't hear any enunciation of letters, or anything familiar in an ocean of the unknown. Best way I can describe it is it's as if someone was stretching innocent vowels on a torture rack.

I hope my post makes sense.

English is my only language and I'm not even good with it though i am trying to get better with my grammar and diction and so on. I've been taught Japanese and Indonesian at school but i would be hard pressed to speak a single word of either of them.

For me your questiom doesn´t make sense. First of all, what means asian languages? Japanese and chinese are completely different ones. Japanese is, phonetically one of the most easy languages out there, but chinese is a really hard one. For example, in Europe one of the most easy languages to speak (not to write) is spanish, because it have very few phonemes and few written consonants have diferent sounds and when you join a specific consonant with a specific vovel it allways sound the same.

Yes, but mostly because that's what I'm going to make my living teaching. English as a language is unbelievably horrible. We don't have a dative and accusative case, so we have to use the same objective form for both, the only time I've seen dative referred to in English grammar is "dative movement" and that's nothing like a real dative case.

We've got roughly 74 common prepositions and most of them have multiple uses, rather than the rather shorter list that most other languages have.

Oh, and if that wasn't fun, I dare you to look for a grammar rule that isn't routinely broken. The closest we have to that is not to split infinitives, dangle participles or write in the passive voice. Except that all of those are perfectly acceptable under the right conditions.

In other words, because English is so complex, convoluted and confusing, I'll be sure to have pay checks for the rest of my life and beyond, but most Americans are fortunate enough not to have any other languages with which to compare English. Otherwise, I'm sure that we'd all give up and just speak Spanish. Or more likely Esperanto, because we're too lazy and impatient to learn something more complicated.
Depends upon the language. It's been a long time since I studied at all. Japanese tends to be fairly straightforward and they've got a limited number of characters which are similar in some respects to the alphabet, those can be memorized fairly quickly.

Chinese tends to be a difficulty. But, from what I've seen, many, many characters look like what they are trying to convey. The character that represents person, looks like a person standing with his hands at his side. The character that corresponds with nation looks like a little fort complete with a flag and border. And a significant number of other characters can be broken down in such detail. But it takes 2-4 years to learn them all as a native speaker in school, or at least that's what my teacher told class when we were studying language acquisition.

Your "yes" and "no" suck. I confuse them a lot. :D

Dutch (Native)
French
English
German (Understand)

Yes, I realize Japanese, Chinese, Korean etc. are all different. I referred to them as Asian languages since, as far as I know, they originate from Asia. Would you have preferred that I refer to that particular language group as Oriental?

Naturally, I know English, and in school I learned a bit of Japanese, though I can't really speak it, and my vocabulary is lacking a bit (I forgot a lot of it). I'm trying to teach myself Korean though.

There's really no need. A "yes" is a "yes", and a "no" is a "no" - they're not big enough words to assume there's a hidden meaning behind them, and they are also simple and finite enough, to understand them.

Unless of course you're living on fantasies and expecting to find hidden meanings behind everything to justify something, in which case, I really can't help you. ;-)

I only have two languages under my belt, though being an American that's actually considered relatively impressive.

Japanese is a very easy language from a phonetic pont of view

For example, on this music video you can see a phonetic transcription of the song using latin letters (they call this kind of transcription romaji, it is something totally standarized). As you can see is very easy to write as you hear (the "romaji" transcription appears on the down left side of the screen).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4gQJc0evQ&feature=fvsr

The japanese also have a sylabarium called Hiragana that helps to transcript Kanjis (japanese logograms). In many magazines and newspapers you can see the phonetic transcription over the Kanji (In chinese they don´t have anything like that).
Compare this with polish or hungarian two of the hardest european languages.
PD: I hate the song I`ve posted

Guys, are eastern languages (i.e. Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, and eveyrthing involving ideograms and "sketches") any easy to learn for a European?

I always shudder just watching them, thinking that if they're such pain to write them, they are even worse to learn them.

Do you mean the written language or spoken language? As a Finnish person the spoken Japanese language isn't that bad, the pronunciation is pretty close to how I'd do it in Finnish, with slight tonal differences on some vowels.

Written in Japanese you need to basically learn two alphabets and the idiograms. That's hard.