I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly
I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing.
But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.
In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.
And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.
Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.
> In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written.
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
Counterpoint here, i spent some years trying to get away from the bar and into tech, and eventually gave up as I both didn't enjoy it and still felt like a failure after 4-5 years of self teaching.
I can blame that partially to not having a mentor or much of a community as you say, but also to mostly just getting remote gigs via upwork where I was supposed to churn out a bunch of work without guidance (very anxiety inducing for a noob), and to my background in arts which put a constant nagging voice in my mind that asked me is this bullshit really what you want to do?
I went back to bartending where I've been quite happy ever since even if poor - it also gives an outlet to my artistic side, as you're partially a performer behind the bar.
After a while i started getting more and more into digital art tho and as i turned 40, i realise i need to make that my main thing and eventually leave the bar behind. It's a tougher jump as there's not nearly as much work as in tech, but I'll have to make it. Knowing how to code is a big advantage though (mostly doing VR and animation in Unreal Engine these days) and when it's just one part of the job i actually find it enjoyable :D
Read "why are artists poor?" By Hans Abbing, who is an artist and an economist himself. It's more focused on the economy of what we call the contemporary art market but it does spend time contrasting it with the economy of """lower""" forms of art (recorded music, commercial illustration etc)
