[WiseWeasel]

It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism does not prepare you for that.

[lars512]

Kanji contain repeated elements ("radicals"), which form something of a graphical alphabet. Learning a new character's form is not too difficult then, you can identify that it's radicals A, B and C, in this kind of arrangement. Basically, it's neatly pre-chunked for memorisation.

The pronunciation of kanji is more difficult than their visual layout, and arguably where most of the burden is in Japanese. A single kanji can have pronunciations it's picked up from several periods in history. In practice, it just means that it might have a handful of different pronunciations in different contexts. Learning all these contexts takes time.

[hkmurakami]

I'm bilingual in English and Japanese (When I am in Japan, people can't tell I'm not from Japan until I tell them).

I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page).

I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.

[chousuke]

Learning kanji isn't quite so hard as people often make it out to be... It's not trivial, of course, but you're off by an order of magnitude. :P A native Japanese person once told more she sees kanji as images, so it probably is different, though.