@CaptainHarley You are correct about that. I only know some Chinese and some Japanese, as my main language is English. I learned to speak Chinese and Japanese from my grandparents, who are Chinese and Japanese. It was difficult, because like you said, they are so highly inflected. Interestingly, however, Chinese, grammatically, is closer to English than Japanese. And syntax-wise, English resembles Chinese more than most European languages——an interesting tidbit I read somewhere.
Both written Chinese and Japanese are very difficult to learn——I didn’t like learning the written languages when I was young and have mastered only about 300 characters, not enough to read a newspaper, which normally requires a knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Written Japanese is a bit easier, with the help of a phonetic script, but it still employs a lot of borrowed Chinese characters. And of course, the tonal language of Chinese, particularly Cantonese, is another obstacle——the verbal language uses up to 7 or 8 tones. That means a pronounced word can have up to 8 different tones, with 8 different meanings, even though it is similar in pronounciation. Think of the English word “affect”. Affect can be pronounced af-fekt’ and used as a verb meaning “to affect”, or it can be pronounced af’-fekt, and used as the noun meaning “a certain behavior or way of acting”. The Chinese spoken language is full of these kinds of words. Eg., the Chinese word “gao” can mean “dog”, “nine”, “to stir”, or “tired”, depending on the tone it is spoken. In this case, there are 4 different tones, denoting a different meaning——dog, nine, to stir, and tired.