Japanese is different. It is pretty easy to learn the main syllables. You can do it in under an hour with the app YuSpeak.
It is much easier to recognize Chinese symbols (Hanzi) than to memorize how to write them. Of course with frequent use it may be worth the effort, and simple ones are easy, and the rules for how to copy a character are straightforward. But even words like beautiful (piaoliang) have complicated symbols, and of course the “older” symbols before 1950s government simplification are more complex still.