Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though. The smallest unit of writing has more information embedded in it. You've got a decent chance of guessing the meaning of a compound word if you know some of the characters in it, though not necessarily the pronunciation. With alphabets, it's reversed, if you know all of the pieces of a word, pronunciation is u…
"Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though." You end up with much lower population literacy rate than countries with alphabetic systems. ex) China at 92% vs Korea at 99%. Hangul was created 600 years ago to counter the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens attempting to memorize the Chinese alphabets. Hangul also by far one of the more exotic alphab…
Re: Non-English-based programming languages
#81Hangul is great, but Japan has a 99% literacy rate as well. With a good method, e.g. Heisig, learning the characters is not very difficult at all.