Jay Mathews, writing in the Washington Post recently in a long article humorously headlined “How to Learn Chinese in 2,200 Not-So-Easy Lessons,” tells readers that the new push in the West to learn Chinese is going to run into some huge problems.

Like kanji.

All 25,000 of them.

Sound familiar? He notes:

Let me — just this once because I don’t like recalling the pain — tell you that learning Chinese is not going to be easy. . . Unkind people are saying at this point: Mathews may have been too dumb or too lazy to master Chinese, but the Chinese themselves seem to be handling their language fine.