Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
Just because people are able to understand strict phonetic transcriptions, doesn't mean it's a good way to convey information (which is why almost no language relies on just strict phonetic transcriptions).
And how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
I knew plenty of elite students who would make classic English blunders like "expresso" or "pacifically"
Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/espresso-vs-expresso...
Maybe language is fine if it conveys the intended meaning.
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
Not ti mention spelling differences and even all the unique words in different English countries. Or within the uk
So it turns out that humans are rather flexible
What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰
Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.
Strictly in terms phonetics, why couldn’t “weird” be spelled “wierd” when English also has “tier”? I’m guessing the Normans are to thank for turning “wyrd” into “weird”.
That's for situations where they had to write something by hand but didn't have their phone with them to check (otherwise they can just spend a second to look at the character), which isn't a common occurrence.
If anything it’s a statement on how the orthography of English in particular doesn’t well match the phonetic structure of the language - something due to a confluence of factors in English several hundred years ago, including the rise of printing.
A better example might involve a common English word with a wierd, non-phonetic spelling. A word that you might imagine it forgivable for even someone who recieved an English PhD to misspell. After all Chinese is a seperate language from English and it is neccessary for it to be evaluated in its own context.
If you think this definetly couldn't happen in English, take a look again at this post -- for it contains eight outright, unambiguous, misspellings of common English words that I would not be surprised if even an English PhD from Harvard made on occassion, especially if your choice of three students were unlucky and they were having embarassingly bad days. (After all, English PhDs isn't the study of spelling, it's the study of literature).