Really? I think Hebrew is a hard language (and I'm not fluent), but my (admittedly ignorant) impression was that Chinese was on a different level of difficulty

Really? I think Hebrew is a hard language (and I'm not fluent), but my (admittedly ignorant) impression was that Chinese was on a different level of difficulty. Hebrew is not tonal, uses an alphabet, and doesn't rely on cultural metahpors in the same way that (I thought) Chinese does.