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I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin.

That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.

If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family names are not distinguishable. The Chinese simplification process is one the of the greatest tragedy in the history of social experiments.

What the Communist should do is to revert to traditional Chinese before it's too late, and start investing more in free education.

As to the difficulty in writing the Han script, you can compose the characters just like every other language. You just need to learn the radicals. If you are trying to comprehend written Chinese in Pinyin, which was invented only for Mandarin, you'll find that it's next to impossible as the Pinyin system removes too much context. There are only 4 tones in Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese's 9, so there are a lot of characters that sound exactly the same in Mandarin.

There is an equivalent of Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo in Chinese called 施氏食獅史, which is a poem of a story about a person name Shi eating a Lion. 92 characters all sound exactly the same.

Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn.

Anyways I certainly wasn't advocating some sort of government-imposed wholesale switchover and banning the characters.. we couldn't even manage a switch to metric in the US, that would be crazy.

As for pinyin being insufficient.. people disambiguate those words from context all the time in spoken conversation, right? Why wouldn't pinyin with tone marks work as a written language? I'm far from fluent or conversational, honestly asking.

Hmm, characters are square and have fixed width. The fonts are automatically fixed width when printed or even handwritten (well enough). With pinyin, you know, like any other phonetic languages, even Japanese, you can hardly match line width with syllables so perfectly. And that's why the Chinese classic poetry, in my biased opinion, is a level higher than, say, its English counterpart, as it requires more effort to not only rhyme the lines, but also match the length of each line.

Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has almost an exact 1-1 mapping from syllable to character, but far less number of commonly used syllables in Mandarin, you simply cannot reconstruct the meaning by looking at the pinyin spelling of a Han character and retrieve the meaning of the character the pinyin spelling maps to. That's what I mean by context.

That's a really interesting point, thanks :)

I'm tempted to try and argue for the sake of it but I'm not even conversational besides 'baby' and 'food' topics and nowhere close to literate. So thanks again for the comment.

But it's not just 26 letters, it's also the 26^n combinations of letters that one has to learn. You might argue that it's not really 26^n because there are rules about vowels etc; but then there are also rules and patterns regarding how the strokes combine together to form Chinese characters, and if there's one thing the human brain is really good at it's recognizing patterns.

It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education.

I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanese is a tremendously more difficult written language. Not only do you have just as many "characters" (kanji, hanzi, 汉子, 漢子, whatever) as you do in Mandarin, those characters can have many different pronunciations. You also have katakana (phonetic, 46 + modifications), hiragana(phonetic, 46 + modifications), and just for fun the occasional English (phonetic, 26). And yet, Japan has a 99% literacy rate.

Compare that to the USA's 97.9% literacy rate, a country that teaches English (26 letters, phonetic), and I think the argument that difficulty of the language reflects the literacy rate falls apart.

You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;)

To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example:

    生 - raw (nama)
    生まれる - to be born (u・mareru)
    生きる - to live (i・kiru)
    生活 - living; life (sei・katsu)
    生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji)

I'll stop there. There are more readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this problem does not exist in Chinese - which uses a single reading mapped to a single character. The same character, in Mandarin, would be read 'shēng' with many of the same meanings (to be born, life, raw)

The above example is one of many kanji with multiple readings in Japanese. How do you know which reading to use? Context and because you know the word. :) That problem isn't unique to Japanese, English suffers from it as well! Think of homophones like tear and tear. You use context to figure out how it is read. It adds some level of difficulty but isn't impossible.

There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation

I stand corrected, thank you. I had Mandarin in mind, although that fact was unclear since I only mentioned it in my example. I'm unfamiliar with Cantonese and lack any knowledge at all of other Chinese dialects. So at least for that character - it has one reading in Mandarin. The two readings in Cantonese are a single (and similar) vowel apart, nothing like the differences between "nama" and "ki". So I'll change my argument: even though Chinese has multiple readings - Japanese takes it a step further in complexity.

According to this page [0], most sound differences in Mandarin are a variant opposed to a completely different sound. Variant sounds are easier to memorize because they often "make sense". In Japanese, variant sounds often occur because it is "easier to pronounce". If I had to wager a guess, Chinese variant sounds are done for the same reason - though I could be wrong on that as well. :)

Thank you for the correction.

[0] http://pinyin.info/chinese_characters/

I agree, the multiple readings in Cantonese/Mandarin are nowhere near as different as the different readings for the same Kanji in Japanese. I never meant to imply otherwise, sorry if I sounded I was.

As someone trying to learn Japanese, it is one of the harder parts of the language for me to learn. Conjugations frustrate me more though. :)

I didn't take it as such - I took it as a correction to my misinformation and updated my argument to reflect the new information. My backing point was 'Japanese makes kanji more difficult than Chinese" but my information wasn't correct originally.

Might I ask what you find difficult about conjugations? I might be able to help. With the exception of U-Verbs (五段) I found that they are very consistent and very "mathematical". Nothing else gets as complicated as "house and houses but mouse and mice, goose and geese but moose and moose". While there are still exceptions due to etymology, they are relatively rare. The same 2 verbs are exceptions to most everything and there are only a few common words which are exceptions, such as いい conjugating as よい.

I concede that 五段活用 is a pain in the rear but it is something you get an "ear" for over time. So if that is were you get frustrated my only advice is chug-chug-chug along! Eventually if you conjugate one of the words incorrectly it sounds wrong to you, even if you aren't certain you were wrong or not.

Yes, it is the verb conjugations that are tripping me up (the English Wikipedia page on this [1] has a complicated chart that looks slightly scary), but they are getting easier the more I use them. I do find many parts of Japanese grammar to be very consistent, like you said.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation

//As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.// The reason for lower literacy rates in India may not anything to do with how complex their scripts are. Elites just passed on their Sanskrit scriptures orally among themselves to exclude others from learning them. Their laws also denied education to the working class. In modern times, many children just can't go to school for many reasons. There are no schools accessible or affordable, they may need to fetch firewood, water, may need to take care of cattle, family members, and so on. (My mom curse their parents to this day, because they stopped her school in her 4th grade, to take care of her baby sister). In south India, there are free meal schemes for school children to alleviate these problems to some extent.

The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3]

[1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan.

[2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan.

[3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...

I find it extremely difficult to believe Japan was able to become a major technological, economical and military world power before WW2 with an essentially illiterate population. I'll keep these works in mind, thanks.