Quote Originally Posted by Боб Уайтман
Quote Originally Posted by chaika
konnichiwa, taty,

But really, your lame note about R/L does not get you off the hot seat. For native English speakers, Japanese is a piece of cake (partly because all the sounds are easy and no stuff like palatalization, and you can even omit the optional tones with no impediment to understanding). I studied Japanese for one summer, so I'm a real expert. JK.

sayonara.
Konnichiwa! Nihongo no hatsuon ga eigo wo hanasu kata tame ni sonnani yasui to omoimasu ka?

I should agree that the Japanese pronunciation is easy for English speakers under the condition if you don't master it well. The real Japanese phonetics is a bit different than you might think of it.

The palatalization does exist in Japanese. O-kyaku-san (guest) IS pronounced with a soft K' (phonetically, [`ok'akusan]), there is no real [k-y-a] sound sequence. The same is true for MYA, MYO, HYO, BYA and other KAIYOON syllables (all of them have palatalized consonants).
Finally, the Japanese SHI (as in WATASHI) is not a real English SH sound, and the Japanese CHI and JI are also different from English ones. They are not sibillants too much, but they are palatal counterparts for Japanese S, T and D.

The things are not so simple, though...
"relatively easy, compared to other languages" does not mean "you can read it as if it were English" (or Russian for that matter), of course it's different.
I would also not call ち/し/じ　"palatal counterparts" -- e.g. Russian soft/hard consonants are palatal counterparts to each other, these are not, they have an extra quality. Which is why the transliteration systems that ignore it are not used much, except for Russia maybe .