It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).
The Chinese govt language proficiency test (HSK) proscribes knowledge of 2900 characters and 8800 words for literacy. Learning those 8800 words is the toughie.
I've been studying mandarin for a year and I still can't read newspapers.
"And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent." When to use each verb modifier (e.g. 了, 过, 正在, 起来, 下去) and how they combine with negators and auxiliaries (e.g. 没, 不, 会, 能) seems more difficult than in English.
But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.
Also, verb conjugation in English is pretty nonexistant, compared to other languages, like Romance languages. There are usually three different verb forms: the standard (write), the past (writed) and the third person singular present (writes). I know there are some irregularities, but generally if you want to say a verb, you use the standard.