Should Chinese Characters be Abolished?

[Marco]

@marasan

@lostinasia

@OrangeOrganics

Mandarin is not close to being hardest language for native English speakers.

But … what you quoted later said it’s in the same category of hardest languages. That sounds reasonably close to me.

@OrangeOrganics

Yes,it turns out it is close

For the comparison with Korean, I think speaking Korean is harder than Mandarin but then with Chinese characters, things even out fairly quickly. Korean is hard because of the honorific forms. You make a lot of embarrassing mistakes in the beginning. Korean grammar is also not easy. But nothing is as intimidating as coming to Taiwan and you can read almost nothing (I knew a few hundred characters before coming here but it still scared me to not be able to decipher street advertisements and menus).

One nice thing about characters as well that wouldn’t be in Pinyin/Zhuyin is the compression.

You can say way more in less space.