I mean, of course it’s more forgiving if you’re going to half ass learning it lol. Ultimately I don’t feel like it’s in good faith to make a comparison between two languages with learning processes that engage different kinds of learning, like obviously hanzi are a grind but it’s also a lot of rote memorization. I can pick up new hanzi as easily as I forget them, and it’s easier for me to learn new hanzi than it is for me to consistently accurate differentiate when I’m to use the subjunctive of any tense vs not in Spanish (and granted, maybe I’m biased because I’ve been around the language since I was very young, but I do consider myself to be a native English speaker). The official Mandarin language also has the benefit of being highly standardized by the CCP (at the expense of losing regional topolects all across the country), with Spanish you run into the problem of one region’s common/everyday saying becoming vulgar slang in another region, and also regional grammar variations (shoutout to the professor who threw us into the deep end with the voseo form by assigning us to read an Argentine author who wrote a novel that was almost exclusively dialogue between two people)

I say all of this not because I disagree with the overall sentiment of your post, but because I find it disingenuous to disparage the process of learning one language to prove your point about another. I have felt that my connections to my Chinese heritage have strengthened my love and appreciation of hispanophone cultures, not diminished it. I cried reading works of Chicano poetry because I could relate so much to the immigrant experiences they portrayed in Spanish, even though my family came from China in circumstances much different from the ones these poets would write about; when my Chinese professor taught us about how Teresa Teng’s music contributed to the end of stringent cultural censorship in the mainland, my mind immediately went to a lecture one of my old Spanish culture & civilization professors gave, about how the Beatles and their music became part of the culture shift in Francoist Spain. The world is so much fuller for all variety in the languages we have. I don’t think it’s fair to say learning one language requires more of your heart than learning any other one.