Hi Naomi, I couldn’t agree more with the difficulty comparison between Spanish and Japanese. I have been learning Spanish for the past 5 years, and my level is probably as high as it needs to be living in a non-spanish speaking country (Australia). I maintain it through CI now. I recently started both Japanese and French following my ‘success’ learning Spanish. With both English (native) and Spanish (high intermediate)… French kind of feels like ‘easy mode’ compared to Japanese. I feel like I can consume french CI without any other form of learning. With Japanese however I feel like I ‘might’ understand the general message watching the easiest videos… but I could also be incorrect.
I chose Japanese as Japan is such a different and amazing culture that my family want to visit multiple times, and it is within an 8hr travel window of where I live (and therefore we don’t lose a day in transit each way).