rett12

It is there another alternative to Skype that is peer-to-peer, has encryption and works on Linux?

Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people.

Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in current use excluding inflections, and several technical and regional vocabularies. Does all English university students know these words?

Korean didn't work at all under the imported Chinese system. Japanese also had problems but they solved inventing the Hiragana, a syllabary system. Both languages chose different systems and both languages work fine.

Also Korean avoids many homophones thanks to it's 10 vowels. Japanese has 5.

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

Seems nice but is only for Mac OS X. Is there an alternative for Linux or Windows?

I suppose everyone here is already on a list anyway. Everyone who leaves a criticism for the NSA. Everyone who up votes this conversation and other similar ones. Everyone who contributes to OSS Privacy. Everyone who misspells Thor. How useful can this really be when there's so much noise?