Yes, learning a few letters that form syllables and through that you can read words even though you don’t know what they mean is not practical, it’s better to learn a some thousand symbols and, if you don’t know a symbol at all, you can’t even say it out loud because you can’t read it.
Ideograms are the imperial units of language.
China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.
The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.
Yes, learning a few letters that form syllables and through that you can read words even though you don’t know what they mean is not practical, it’s better to learn a some thousand symbols and, if you don’t know a symbol at all, you can’t even say it out loud because you can’t read it.
Ideograms are the imperial units of language.
China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.
The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.