>>27
I disagree. To vastly oversimplify, many of the things Japanese can do which put it above most other languages have to do with how it makes ideograms and phonograms work together. Chinese uses only ideograms (native speakers will try to tell you they have a phonetic alphabet to help learn the characters, but that doesn't count since it's never used in any remotely serious writing), so it has all the strengths and weaknesses of ideograms, namely it is highly artistic while having some extreme issues with clarity.
The easiest example is simply that Chinese pronunciation is a living hell. Though I doubt it's the only language that uses tones, the fact remains that learning tones, and getting used to hearing and using them naturally on every syllable in a sentence, is an incredible pain. If I didn't love languages so much I'd never have even tried, much less made slight progress on it (my hearing is subpar, so I'll never be any good at it). In addition, a number of phonemes they use are so, so similar it is almost impossible to tell them apart, even for some of the native speakers I shared the class with. And the fact that pinyin is incredibly counterintuitive to anyone but a resident of China certainly doesn't help.
The second easiest concrete example is that, always in Japanese, and sometimes in English, you can tell what part of speech a word is by knowing some basic phonetic cues. Such as "ly" at the end means it's probably an adverb, and "s" or "es" at the end means it's probably a plural noun. In Japanese, cues like that work on probably half of the entire lexicon, and with so few exceptions I could count them on one hand. In Chinese, you usually have no way to tell what part of speech something is without having memorized that detail along with the word itself. Since this can get rather ridiculous, they have a whole subset of particles for the sole purpose of marking which word is what part of speech, when it is judged to be too confusing. Naturally, when that is and isn't true is impossible for me to comprehend much less take advantage of after only a year of study.