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I am not asking for me. I never interact with Chinese writing, so it is not my problem, I am asking for them, as I imagine that learning a minimum of 3000 icons would take a lot of time. Computers struggle with Chinese writing (or at least last time I talked with my friend he had this keyboards where they had hundreds of combinations).

I found that believing that a person trying to understand something and asking a respectful question is rude is incredibly rude and ignorant.


But you can make the same argument for any non-englisb language today - any language is more difficult to use than English when it comes to computers. For the general case, if your friend was living in China, it'd be the norm, there wouldn't be any Saturday classes. The diaspora has to make do. Moreover, in China, it is the norm, they do not perceive their writing as being problematically difficult, they've made do with it for some years now and it works in China.

I do want to stress that any language that is old enough will eventually contort into a state where the writing is lagging behind the spoken language as it develops faster, and eventually lots of room for optimization starts to appear, lots of legacy to remove. As the culture develops and the spoken language simplifies and words get added, ambiguity seeps in, rudimentary language construcs start to appear unfamiliar to the commmon speaker. The vocabulary now consists of a large mix of old and new, with some redundancy and barbarisms thrown in for good measure. And now, there's lots of room for improvement. And sometimes a nation (or its authorities) decides that its time to simplify things, as mainland China and Sweden and others have done. I wish someone did this with English, bit since there's a multiplicity of English speaking countries, there will never be a meaningful overhaul that doesn't turn into a massive mess.

I have absolutely no trouble using spanish or german on my computer. Only 2 more keys.
Chinese people could very easily ask "why has the western world not switched to the Chinese alphabet?"

Neither is objectively superior to the other, you are just used to what you were born into

The icons are made up of strokes and there are only a handful of strokes in Chinese writing. The combination of strokes and the location is arguably as complicated as spelling in English.

When I read anything, be it mandarin or Japanese or English, I attach meanings to words first. In fact, I am attaching meaning to logical structures and phrases, and then the individual words make the detail. Converting words into sounds seems to be a different skill from converting words into meaning. It really doesn’t matter whether the words are made of strokes or letters of the alphabet, the breakdown of the little details is a separate mechanism from comprehension.

I'm pretty sure that your friend couldn't do anything with you on Sat was a parenting issue, not a language issue...

If he juse had used Spanish, he would have been learning piano or something on Saturday.

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