I've been slowly learning Japanese, mostly with Duolingo, and that's a conclusion I've noted as well. People get hung up on the "complexity" of even hiragana an

I've been slowly learning Japanese, mostly with Duolingo, and that's a conclusion I've noted as well. People get hung up on the "complexity" of even hiragana and katakana, complaining about there being two many or those two scripts being duplicates. There are fewer total hiragana and katakana than there are English digrams and trigrams in lower-case and capital letters. (Because Japanese uses fewer overall phonemes...and the characters are consistent in terms of pronunciation, unlike English.) I'm not very far into kanji (just some basic ones like 水 or 人 that stick) but the principles are solid: they have shared stroke components (radicals) that related kanji share, much like similar collections of letters, and studying them as you study vocabulary isn't really any different than knowing what an English word looks like on sight, without "sounding it out."