I could see that being somewhat more applicable to Chinese but it's possible he might just have no idea what he's talking about- people who don't teach language can really have no idea what it's like to learn their own language.

I took Japanese for many years and lemme tell ya, the writing system seriously got in the way of actually learning to say anything . And Japanese uses a cross between the Chinese writing system and a homegrown system that's similar to an alphabet, making it slightly easier to write than Chinese but similar in many ways. Simplified Chinese makes it slightly easier but it's probably still harder than Japanese based on the sheer character count. It took me 6 or 7 years of classes to hit the level of proficiency you could reach in 1 year of latin-alphabet based language classes. Part of that is the related words, but still. Writing was a fuck.

I would get a second opinion from someone who learned it to a high degree of fluency, as a second language.