If English was written like Chinese

The Koreans got tired of using this messy combination of sound and meaning, and came up with one of the simplest writing systems: Hangul. It is very easy to learn and has built-in mnemonics for the sounds.

One big advantage of an ideographic writing like Chinese is that the link between text and the language proper is, in fact, much weaker than it is in the case with letters which more or less represent the way the language sounds, and so the same text could potentially be understood by speakers of different languages who happen to share the same writing system. In theory (perhaps not quite in practice), then, it should suffice for an English speaker to know the meaning of Chinese characters to be able to read and understand a text without knowing any Chinese proper. (It helps that ideograms are easier to remember that seemingly random sequences of letters.)

It's a pretty fun way to explain how Chinese writing works, without going for the Chinese symbols, highly evolved after a few millennia of use.

Were this text written in modern times, I suspect that instead of the lovely ball pen shapes the author could choose to use emoji, to make it more readily understandable! :)

This isn't exactly what the article is about, but I've noticed that English is becoming more like Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The rise of emoji, text-speak-shorthand and making communication more pictograms.

This was fun to read, it reminded me of Arrival a bit.