"Gotisch" typeface is unusual to eyes used to roman letters. I first encountered it in church in the German services we still had when I was a child. Funnily enough, OCR software can handle it, as I found about 15 years ago (I got tired up doing directory look-ups manually).
Since Japanese uses some Chinese characters, I checked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese to see how Cantonese is written: "Mandarin and Cantonese text almost look the same, but both are pronounced differently." Challenging!