Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language.
That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled.
So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.
That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled.
So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.