I'm unironically starting to understand Mandarin without a systematic effort It's… surprisingly neat. There is a limited number of radicals and «roots», a compound/compression system, sentences are ≈strings of verbs and nouns. If you can learn Java, you can learn Mandarin
and holy shit Russian is insane in comparison only rescued by alphabetic system that adequately maps onto Latin, and having similar phonetics I thought Americans are just stupid for putting it into Tier IV, but that's about right
