[scroot]

The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.

[cpfohl]

I was responding to the claim in the article:

> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.

Memorizing thousands of characters is a lot more work, but the memorization isn’t the main part of learning a language…