There are many large and small challenges you encounter when learning Japanese.

For example, it’s difficult being at peace with the idea that your brain actually can learn to read hiragana and kanji just like it perceives written English, and breaking through this barrier is an important early milestone.

Another small challenge is translating single-word concepts in English into Japanese, which is usually more complex. For example, just as the Eskimo supposedly have many names for snow (which turns out not to be all that true), there are multiple words for rice that are used on a daily basis, like uncooked rice (kome), unpolished rice (genmai), steamed rice that’s ready to eat (gohan, which also refers to all food), newly harvested rice (shinmai, also used to refer to a new employee at an organization), and so on.

Being an island nation, the Japanese eat various types of plants grown in the sea, which we call by the unappetizing name of “seaweed.” Major categories include nori, the dried, green seaweed eaten with sushi; wakame, green leaves eaten in soup; and konbu, a kind of seaweed that’s almost black, used as flavoring in soup or eaten on rice.

The Japanese similarly have about five different kinds of tea which would probably be called “green tea” by the average Westerner but which are all very different.