The death blow is the tones. For the Anglo-centric, not only are you unable to "read out" the characters like you can Latin-based scripts (let alone the "cursive script"), but if the tones are off, you'll accidentally call your mother (妈 mā) a horse (马 mǎ). Japanese is a lot more straightforward in this regard.
On its own, each challenge is surmountable. English has words that are diffcult to pronounce and memorize too (see Ghoti [0] and "read/lead" [1]).
But when the whole language is like that, it becomes a lot harder.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/221b2t/read...
> Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.
> But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists.
> A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.
I have always been attracted to languages with a different alphabet, but Chinese always just seemed completely out of my league. I don't know if that is correct, but Japanese seemed easier to speak (like I could repeat words or small sentences and people would understand), whereas it seems very difficult to merely say something that a Chinese native will understand.
