SOV word order is the least difficult part of Japanese to learn, even for English speakers. Of course, language learning is generally difficult!

You could study most of what you needed to know about Japanese SOV in a few hours — of course, then there's dozens of hours of practice to get it right.

Germanic languages go one step further in having a choice between VSO and SVO depending on various complex rules - e.g. in Dutch, Ik hang aan het plafond (“I stick to the ceiling”) but Nu hang ik aan het plafond (“Now stick I to the ceiling”) or even sometimes Nu hang ik het plafond aan (“Now stick I the ceiling to”); in German, even more dramatic word order changes are possible because its cases indicate subjects and objects; and yet English speakers pick these languages up fairly easily, particularly compared with Japanese.

Japanese grammar is more synthetic than English is. Learning the "morphology" of Japanese words, how the word changes depending on what they are doing in the sentence, would take tens of hours to learn and hundreds of hours to master. (I don't speak Japanese, but I speak six languages and have idly spent a few hours looking into how Japanese is put together.)

In Japanese, part of the morphology of words is honorifics, and these too and the consequent social picture would take some large amount of time to study and master, I can't really guess because it's so opaque to me.

Learning hiragana, katakana and kanji up to the level of a Japanese secondary school student would take you thousands of hours. Learning vocabulary to the same level would also take you thousands of hours.

So SOV really a big deal isn’t. This easy in English to do is; sentences entirely understandable are.

Overall, I the article loved, but I to quibble about this part just wanted.