ehal256

Hangul is great, but Japan has a 99% literacy rate as well. With a good method, e.g. Heisig, learning the characters is not very difficult at all.

I mostly use the dictionary on my phone. I can get by with a paper one, but it's a bit slower.

Bad in what way exactly? Hiragana and Katakana are easier to pick up, because there is more burden placed in learning each individual word. With the baseline investment to learn the Kanji in place, each new word is just a composition of characters and their associated ideas that you already know.

You can do the same thing with dictionaries in Japanese or Chinese, though it works best if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the characters (it helps a lot if you learn your radicals and stroke orders well, so that you can easily write characters you don't know).

Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though. The smallest unit of writing has more information embedded in it. You've got a decent chance of guessing the meaning of a compound word if you know some of the characters in it, though not necessarily the pronunciation. With alphabets, it's reversed, if you know all of the pieces of a word, pronunciation is usually simple, but meaning not necessarily so (especially in English). As a result, the written language is more dense, and can actually be read more quickly.

Finally, with an appropriate method, it doesn't have to take years to learn enough characters to write and read literately, I can read Japanese at a high school level, and I've been at it for a year and a half.