So, for context, I wrote the comment you replied to as a French who speaks Japanese fluently and has been learning both Cantonese and Mandarin. So I am talking from experience and I completely disagree with you.
First, I disagree that vocabulary is the part that causes by far the least problems, instead in general my approach to learning any language is to first focus on learning the vocabulary. And to counter your latin example, when I was a child, I studied Latin, after my first 6 months of latin, I went to live in Spain for 5 months, when I came back latin was significantly easier than it was before. I could understand a lot more than I could before. The only reason for this was that I know could speak Spanish and could use that to guess words.
Of course this works a lot better on writings that are not poems, in general poems like your example are more difficult to understand without knowing the cultural context around them. If you want to really illustrate your point, try with a text that's not a poem and you will see that knowing the vocabulary does indeed significantly help.
Second, reading is absolutely an essential part of knowing a language. At this point, I really don't even know how to answer to this besides asking for clarification why you would come to this conclusion? I'll just say that I would have loved having the significant advantage Chinese students have when it comes to reading Japanese.
Finally, I was going to make the same points historia_novae about how many words really do have the exact same meaning in written form between Japanese and Chinese. But he expressed that better than I could.
First, I disagree that vocabulary is the part that causes by far the least problems, instead in general my approach to learning any language is to first focus on learning the vocabulary. And to counter your latin example, when I was a child, I studied Latin, after my first 6 months of latin, I went to live in Spain for 5 months, when I came back latin was significantly easier than it was before. I could understand a lot more than I could before. The only reason for this was that I know could speak Spanish and could use that to guess words.
Of course this works a lot better on writings that are not poems, in general poems like your example are more difficult to understand without knowing the cultural context around them. If you want to really illustrate your point, try with a text that's not a poem and you will see that knowing the vocabulary does indeed significantly help.
Second, reading is absolutely an essential part of knowing a language. At this point, I really don't even know how to answer to this besides asking for clarification why you would come to this conclusion? I'll just say that I would have loved having the significant advantage Chinese students have when it comes to reading Japanese.
Finally, I was going to make the same points historia_novae about how many words really do have the exact same meaning in written form between Japanese and Chinese. But he expressed that better than I could.