Is language learning that easy? 言語を勉強することはあんなに簡単？

I'm intrigued by Tim Ferris' post on how to learn a language, though he characterized Japanese as simple phonetically and deftly avoided the greater challenge of the writing system (which I'll expand on later). Learning only one of the phonetic systems wouldn't take you too far. In fairness to Ferris, he was originally focused on spoken structures, but then he digressed, which reminds me, Uniqlo opened a store in Oxford street!