In most European countries, yes. No, the crazy one is British English -___-" it has a lot of ridiculous words. Or maybe it's because I read too much literature. American English is easier, actually. At least according to me.

There's katakana (for the words they get from other languages, or foreigners' name), hiragana and kanji. The latter was the hardest and the craziest. I haven't studied that far, though.

Oh, I forgot to say that there are LJ communites that'll help you with languages. I don't know any comms for German or Korean, though :( but I've been using learn_nordic for Swedish.