I'm French and did managed to learn to read in 2 hours. I know a bit more of Russian now but 2 hours was enough to learn to read. Of course I was still reading

I'm French and did managed to learn to read in 2 hours. I know a bit more of Russian now but 2 hours was enough to learn to read. Of course I was still reading very slowly syllable by syllable but it was enough to read. With Mandarin, 2 hours isn't enough just to list all the meta-categories of all the signs :p. That's what I meant by the big difference between the two. Switching from Chinese characters like Vietnam did isn't the same effect as switching from a Cyrillic alphabet which is much simpler.