n the last 500 years, Japanese has close contact with the western world. Thus you can recognize there are some familiar words sound like English, French, German, Portuguese and many other languages. Those new words from the western origin keep part of the original meaning and also carry some new information about economy, medicine, education, government, cuisine, clothing, and sports.
Japanese carry on adding more words on computer, other new technology and science.

Though my personal study experience, to master common Japanese conversation topics are not too hard. In fact, it's could be easier then your expectation. Unlike many European languages, you won't need to learn about plurals, gender markers, conjugating verbs for the first, second person, the future tense and many other complicated grammatical knowledge. Leave your entire headache behind; you just require understanding that the subjects of sentences are basically understood from the context and omitted when omitted understood. Yes, it's quite like study Spanish, if you know a bit Spanish you will feel relax now.

In Japanese language, the words of I, you, she, he, they and we are not use very often. Instead, people like to be addressed by name or titles during the conversation. "To be", the verb in Japanese is "desu". The good news about it is this verb does not change with person. Word order in Japanese is almost the same order to compare with English. You need subject, next followed by objects, and then verb. For example, if you want to tell "I'm Marry" then you can say "Merii decu". Give another try, "He's Tom", then say "Tomu desu". One more common example, when you want to say "They are my friends." try it first yourself. The answer is "Tomodachi desy". "Tomodachi" means "friends" or "friend". As we talked earlier, you won't bothered by plurals anymore.