I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
Also what’s the best resource to learn?
I went to Japan for my honeymoon and so did the obligatory ‘learn the basics’ that I try to do before any trip to a new country.
Getting to a polite level so you can order food, find a train station and so on is relatively easy - probably a week’s effort if you really go for it.
Getting to a conversational level is a whole extra jump from there, however. Definitely a bigger leap than the equivalent in Spanish, for example. Based on this, I’d think that getting to a level where you can follow native speakers doing the exaggerated anime over-acting dialogue would be a hell of a slog and a very commendable achievement.
As everyone else is saying, the written language is very hard to learn, especially if you’re new to non-Latin alphabets. Japanese has three of the damned things and they mix and match seemingly at random (to the eye of the uneducated).
Edit: forgot to say - I like Duolingo for ease of access and I also bought a little phrase book.
My opinion: if you have an interest and an excuse, go for it! Learning more is never the wrong answer.