If English was written like Chinese (1999)

I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文.

Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.

The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".

I think English spelling is a pain but overall I think 中文 is worse. There are an awful lot of characters to know for one thing. My understanding is that you have to work pretty hard to be literate in 中文. Also I understand that the horizon where 中文 gets hard to read is closer in time than it is English, that is even 150 year old texts are difficult to read and reading Confucius is harder than reading Chaucer. Contrast the problem of memorizing irregular spellings to the problem of remembering how to draw thousands of characters.

I must admit that I really like Interlingua

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

which is kind of a cleaned-up Latin. As a native English speaker who knows a lot of Latin roots from science and literature and who also has gotten good doses of Spanish and French, I can read the sample texts in that Wikipedia page right off that bat.

It is a strange thing though that you can go through the first few chapters of a book on 中文 grammar and get the feeling there is something refreshingly regular about that language, almost as if it was an artificial language. When you get towards the end you find there are many things that will strain this sense of quick familiarity and I am told if you actually try to use the language it's harder than you think.

I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.