Interesting post but the OP is linguistically naive, which is generally what happens when English speakers encounter another language with more interesting (i.e. exotic") morphological, phonetical, etc. elements. If Arabic if your first foray into a highly inflectional language, it might look fairly exotic. If you had studied, say ancient Greek or Latin, first, it might look less so.

"you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper." This comment about Chinese and Japanese (totally unrelated languages with very different writing systems, is laughable. The syntax of Chinese is simple (it pretty much has non at all) but Japanese syntax is complicated.

The OMG moment one faces when faced with thousands or weird Chinese signs is partly an illusion. Yes, you have to memorize a lot of things, like any other languages, but the meaning of a Chinese word can be guessed if you know the determinitve, even f you don't know the word. There are only about 200 determinitives.

An interesting thing about Arabic is that, due to its tie to Koran, it's been studied linguistically since early times. But other languages can also boast such long examined lives, e.g. Sanskrit or Chinese.