I lived in China for about two years. Trust me, switching from an asian to western based language (or vice-versa) is one of the hardest things one can do in their life. Your comment, I dont know if it was sarcastic or not, but seriously try to have some respect for how incredibly freakin' hard it is to learn a language that isn't based off your own. I'd bet you, oh, just about anything, that you'd still suck at speaking/listening Japanese after five years. Let alone trying to read and write... Not to mention that English is one of the hardest languages to learn. It's not that hard when compared to tonal languages like Mandarin.