[kusokurae]

long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine.

I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore.

Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute.

Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue.

We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it.

Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it.

We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years.

If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.

[bapak]

> many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore.

Yes but that's not really comparable.

You can misspell "litrally" but how close can you get if you can't remember any stroke of the glyph? There's an inherent advantage in spelling words closely to how they sound.

I'm not saying English is great at this either, but I can still write "Kernel Sanders" and you know what it means, without using a whole other writing system as fallback (pinyin)

[kusokurae]

Hey! So in the vast majority of cases, what you're describing for english is more or less the same for these languages -- when I forget a real bastard of a character (usually a less complex one similar to many others), I can sort of mentally picture the shape, but not quite. I get a flash of the shape in my mind, but then it's gone, and I'm in a half-position where I know parts of it, maybe I know it has 广 and something like 多 inside there somewhere (this is purely academic, I'm not referencing a real character here), but I don't know the exact order. Quite often this is where the art of bodging it, scribbling it, or using a variant character comes in handy.

Also, for more fun, Chinese and even rarely Japanese will sometimes use a different character sharing the same pronunciation from a set of characters typically used for just phonetic pronunciation, in the place of the one they've forgotten.