> As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters.
It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really is possible to learn 20 kanji a day if you dedicate about 45 minutes of time.
There's a similar book called Remembering the Hanzi (both Traditional and Simplified versions are available) that you can use to much the same effect. At 20 per day, you can learn the 5000 hanzi that are said to cover just about everything you might come across in day-to-day life in less than a year.
I am not sure if Chinese and Japanese can be equated like that. I find Chinese much easier to learn than Japanese because Chinese characters have plenty of built-in pronunciation mnemonics that don't help as much with the Japanese pronunciation. When I studied Japanese, I wasted lots of time coming up with stories to remember complex characters.
Maybe it also depends on whether you have good pictorial memory or need some kind of analytical system, I definitely belong to the latter camp.
You're right, I think the consensus is that the Japanese system is much harder than the Chinese (i.e. Mandarin). The reasons are:
1. it consists os three different systems side by side with complex and sometimes arbitrary rules of switching between:
2. Japanese and Chinese are totally unrelated languages, so the Chinese characters were bolted on due to cultural reasons (similar to how Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet previously). Chinese characters evolved naturally and are suited with Chinese, since many words were single syllable. They are ill-suited for writing languages unrelated to Chinese.
3. Finally, Japanese has a complicated honorifics system which is hard for foreigners to grasp.
The super complicated Japanese writing system is to be contrasted with the Korean system, which although it uses many Chinese characters (again die to cultural reasons) has a system that is ideally suited to its phonology. I think the difficulty of learning spoken Japanese and Korean would be on par; the writing system makes learning Japanese really hard.
I used RTK as well, except with the website kanji.koohii.com instead of Anki, to learn 50 kanji a day. Did that for 2 months before moving to Japan, started using Anki for vocab / grammar, and passed the JLPT 1 examination in less than a year and a half.
My senseis and American coworkers were, but knowing the meaning of individual kanji is still two steps away from learning the actual reading and usage in compound words （熟語）, so I still had no right to show off.
It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really is possible to learn 20 kanji a day if you dedicate about 45 minutes of time.
There's a similar book called Remembering the Hanzi (both Traditional and Simplified versions are available) that you can use to much the same effect. At 20 per day, you can learn the 5000 hanzi that are said to cover just about everything you might come across in day-to-day life in less than a year.