P.S.

Here's something fun about the Japanese language:

To understand 80% of an English language newspaper, you need a vocabulary of around 1000 words. To understand 90%, you need 3000 words.

For French, that's 1000 and 4000 words, respectively. For Russian, Korean, or Chinese papers, that rises to about 2000 and 5000 words.

To read and understand 80% of a Japanese newspaper, you need to know 5,000 words, and to understand 90%, you need a vocabulary of 10,000 words.

The reason for this huge vocab requirement is simple: Japanese is a language with many levels, not only of politeness and respect, but also of what one could call "sophistication." For simple day-to-day speech, people tend to use a certain limited vocabulary. For a professional publication like a newspaper, they bring out the mother of all mental thesauruses, and write in a much more sophisticated-sounding, largely Chinese-derived language. For any particular English word, there might be five acceptable translations in Japanese, each with a subtle difference in meaning and register, and you might sound like an idiot or a prude if you don't pick the right one based on the circumstances.
This is comparable to the stiff-sounding, Latin-derived language of the medicinal or scientific disciplines. The difference here is that everyone is expected to know it, and these words really are used in daily life, if usually in writing. Hence, even if someone is fluent in spoken Japanese, they could very well be baffled by a simple newspaper article. And let's not even talk about the nightmarish kanji-kana-latin mishmash that is the Japanese writing system.

So it sort of irritates me when people learn a romance language or two on the side, while studying something "useful" like engineering or materials science. Unless you're a gifted linguist, and I sure as hell am not, Japanese takes a lot of time and focus to study. But in the end, one language is pretty much "equal" to another, in that two people who speak the same language can communicate fluidly. The only thing that sets Japanese apart is the relative scarcity of non-Japanese who can speak it.

Oh well. I enjoy the study and I'm living a worthwhile life, so I'm not complaining. But when people get smug about knowing four languages as opposed to two (yes, I'm talking about you, Europeans), it gets my hackles up a bit.