'Maybe from someone who has a large Broca's area
The difficult things for a westerner are getting to grips with characters, kanji and grammatical structure (SOV vs SVO that we know). This is why it gets characterised with the most difficult languages. But in terms of grammatical tense, plurality and phonology (words sounding similar are also a problem) it's a lot easier than English and associated languages. Kanji is just repetition, memorising.