With Japanese you can write in hiragana\katakana and those are part of the "expressing a sound on paper". Japanese is the best of both worlds. I always thought of Chinese as a pain in the ass for that reason. All kanjis all the time? Argh. A bit and a bit is a saner option imo. Maybe one day I'll try Chinese. Maybe not. So little time in life, so many pictures of cats to see. I'm glad I learnt English while I was a little brat. Almost as a native language. In fact, gimme a book in English and one in my native language and I'll pick the former every time. Ofc, I almost never spoken it irl, so I probably sound like a dying walrus in a conversation. Once I tried Japanese, made a good bit of progress, but laziness got the better of me. And I have a couple of nice certificates of German from when I was in high school. Amazingly they have good marks, but I have no memories of it. Must had been too drunk probably, you know how those years go. Btw, I always choose en-gb, can't beat the British.