That's part of it, but another way vocabulary can be easy is if it is self-documenting meaning you can figure out the meaning without memorizing it specifically. The Chinese 地理 is literally "Earth Science" (a term also used in English but with a broader meaning of all sciences dealing with the earth including geology and geophysics as well as geography) . Spanish "geografía" means "earth description" but isn't as self-documenting because to recognize this you have to go outside the language to Ancient Greek.
Well in Japanese it's the same word but now you have to know all about Chinese for Japanese words, not to mention learning to write the characters, which is just a big hurdle you don't have to worry about with Western languages. And beyond that, yeah, Spanish words you might need to know about Greek and Latin morphemes but my point is those exact same ones are all over our language already so they're familiar. I already know that "geo-" means "Earth" and "co-" means "together" from my native language.
