On the other hand you do have languages like Chinese where learning the written language actually is the majority of the work. Spoken Chinese is probably one of the easier languages out there for a person coming from a random language.
Most languages also have a large number of words that an English speaker will recognise — and even more if they've ever learned any other language. Being able to transliterate at least lets you have a good chance of spotting some things you'll know. This is even more so in places where there'll be a large number of imported words, such as many restaurants, cafés, etc.
It really helps in a coffee shop to be able to get as far as choosing between 'Espreso', 'Kapuchino', 'Nas so sladoled', 'Makiyato malo', 'Makiyato golemo', 'Fredo', 'Frape', 'Ladno chokoladno mleko', 'Klasic crno chokolado', 'Klasic belo chokolado', or 'Meksikansko chokolado', rather than a board full of gibberish.
As a student that is currently learning Chinese, the first sentence is true, from a Chinese perspective. The written language is extremely important for Chinese nationals; I've heard of all sorts of arguments from expats at my school, saying stuff like: "I just want to learn how to say X; when am I going to write it!?" Practically speaking, reading is much easier than writing (I can read way more than I can write) and once you hit a particular threshold of characters, you can read 90% of the text around you.
As for the second sentence, for a person with no background in tonal languages, learning the tones in Mandarin is extremely challenging. I assuming that the parent is a native English speaker. According to the Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin and Cantonese (you didn't specify what kind of Chinese) are among the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker.[0]
I think Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) is difficult. And this is coming from a native English speaker with a background in Cantonese (my parents are from Hong Kong).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_difficult_language_to_lea...
I'm not even a native English speaker, I'm Greek, which also isn't tonal.
The biggest mistake of most Chinese learners is taking tones too seriously. Really, they aren't that important. If you screw up a tone in context you'll still be understood. Focus on words and grammar first, pronunciation isn't that important since most people have dialects. Cantonese people speaking mandarin can be quite entertaining though.
When I first moved to Beijing, I had problems getting the taxi drivers to understand me since I wasn't putting the 'er' behind everything, which is local dialect. Suffice it to say, I now speak with a Beijing accent.
One of my friends, who is native Chinese insisted the tones are critical. I asked her how they understand lyrics in music since the tones get dropped in favor of the melody.
Turns out the tones aren't that critical.
I'd like to add that this depends on where you are. The Taiwanese almost completely merge s/sh, z/zh, c/ch and also n/ng in some cases. You cannot distinguish between 4 and 10 without tones here. I have often heard that the Taiwanese rely more on tones, and Beijingers rely more on the actual sounds (as in Western languages).
Also, most of the time when people do not understand me, it is precisely because of the tones. I still often encounter situations where a friend will repeat my last sentence character for character, making me think "that's what I said!!", but apparently I didn't.
Reading is super easy, handwriting is a useless but fun hobby. Pronunciation is super tough.
(I am German, though - but if anything, I feel that we have it easier to pronounce Mandarin sounds.)
When I'm really tired, I sometimes change my 'sh' to 's' and sound more southern. Nobody really cares. However, I do screw up sometimes when saying words like "jichang" and "jingcheng," and will wind up on the wrong expressway in the taxi. This has not much to do with tones though.
But their criteria is the study time required to reach proficiency in both spoken and written language. Arguably, Chinese and Japanese wouldn't take so long to learn if they had simpler writing systems.
I gave up on written Chinese a while ago. I can text well enough and do some simple IM conversations, basically my writing mirrors my oral skills fairly closely. But I can't read a sign, a notice, a newspaper, its almost another language and I'm not so interested in putting the effort in.
Road signs in general wildy vary. The name 'Weizmann' (as in [1]) is generally butchered in latin script. The best form I found so far was in Acre and spelled 'Wiseman'.
Often the signs just contain a transcript of the Hebrew word. I saw a couple of signs that spell out 'Nemal', which isn't particularly helpful unless you know that this is the Hebrew word for the port.
Bottom line: The road signs here confuse the hell out of me. I'm amazed that they helped you learn the alphabet somehow.
Knowing the Japanese hiragana and katakana means you can work out some menus in Japanese games - "startu"; "opshun"; etc. (This is not romaji, because they're using English words and a Japanese alphabet. So what's that called?)
デリヘルの意味が分からないはずなのに・・・ ಠ_ಠ