I disagree. I think learning 10,000 pictograms is much harder than learning English spelling. Even just learning the 2000 needed for reading Japanese or 3000 to 4000 needed for Chinese is harder. Of course most Han pictograms are composed of a few hundred "letters" (e.g. 能 is made up of a 厶, a 月, and two 匕s) but the correspondence between a "spelt" pictogram to the spoken word or meaning in Chinese or Japanese is far more variable than between the spelling of an English word and its pronunciation.