[Jansen312]

Imagine you are limited to only pen and paper and need to communicate with another using written Chinese. Then even though what you convey will be exactly same meaning and characters count, simplified will consumed less effort (less ink and paper as well) to deliver equivalent same message in Chinese Traditional. From language studies perspective they view a token as basic unit of information, but in engineering and practicality, OP ideas of pixel measurement would be better. You can't transmit information to humans using "token" but displayed form via pixels. As for Simplified Chinese is much harder to learn, let just say Mao had proven you wrong with vast majority Chinese (outside of China) learning Simplified form much faster and less effort than Traditional form. Even Taiwanese using simplified form to describe the name "tai" in Taiwan.

[SeanLuke]

I'm sorry, but information means something, and it does not equate to number of strokes. A character can have millions of strokes and still convey the same information as a character with a single stroke.

There are other measures of "efficiency" of course. If the author wanted to argue for how long it took to write a sentence, then sure, Simplified is definitely more "efficient" than Traditional in this context. On the other hand, it's pretty odd to be defining languages in terms of written form rather than their spoken form. (And I'm not sure why Cantonese would be more efficient than Simplified Mandarin as Cantonese is normally written using traditional glyphs.)

Anyway, the author inserted information into this discussion. And if efficiency is in terms of information, then this pixel argument doesn't hold water.

As to the difficulty of simplified chinese: this is a well studied topic with a lot of scholarly analysis. I am pretty sure the literature as a whole strongly disagrees with your claim.

[bllguo]

uh, what? once we're talking about simplified vs. traditional it should already be clear that the discussion is about the languages in terms of written form? in fact the entire article makes clear that it is about written language.

Not using "information" in a scientifically proper way is a fine criticism, I just don't understand why you seem to think the author did not define "efficiency" when it is one of the first points made..

re: simplified chinese, i guess im bad at searching? care to provide a review paper?