Comment by nephihaha

Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.

Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.