Learning any language that does not implement the American/ Roman alphabet is a difficult endeavor, even for those individuals used to intense intellectual study. Part of the problem with such languages is that each one requires transliteration between English letters (Roman alphabet) and the characters in the target language. The ryukyuan, semitic, and sinitic languages all require such transliteration in any practical work.
There are myriad attempts by linguists and professors to simplify the learning process. In my own experience these methods have only made learning the foreign language (particularly the written language of Chinese and Japanese characters) more complicated than necessary. Associations between the appearance of a character in Japanese, for example, are made with familiar objects that the foreigner can recognize (and draw a correlation between the two). This can lead to false associations, and it doesn’t really help the foreigner truly think in the target language.
(Bare with me as I revise this post from 2009. We're still putting Lane of Scholars back together here.)
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