If English was written like Chinese (1999)

How Chinese-style writing maps (or doesn’t) to English

• Several commenters note the article’s core analogy works pedagogically, but English lacks Chinese’s “one syllable ≈ one morpheme” structure, so a hanzi-like system fits poorly.
• English syllables like “ran” or “dom” rarely carry standalone meaning, unlike typical Chinese syllables, so building meaning-bearing characters per syllable would be artificial.
• Some wonder to what extent Chinese’s morphology was shaped by its script versus preexisting features.

Phonetic tools vs logographs (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

• Chinese uses tools like Zhuyin (bopomofo) and romanization (pinyin) for phonetics and input, but adults almost never write extended text in them; characters remain the main output.
• Opinions differ on bopomofo’s real-world importance: some say it’s marginal and mostly educational; others report it’s still widely used in Taiwan for IMEs and children’s books.
• Japanese and Korean historically used Chinese characters; Japanese kept kanji plus kana, while Korean largely abandoned hanja in favor of hangul.
• There is debate whether kanji make Japanese easier or harder:
  • Pro-kanji: reduce ambiguity and help segment text; kana-only prose feels exhausting.
  • Anti-kanji: massively raises learning burden and reading uncertainty; Korean shows a clean alphabetic system can work well.

Homophones, tones, and ambiguity

• Chinese has many homophones; logographs and tones carry heavy disambiguation load.
• Some argue phonetic writing would become incomprehensible; others counter that spoken communication already works, and tones can be written.
• Several point to the famous “lion-eating poet” poem to illustrate how phonetic-only text can be near-impossible to parse in Chinese.

Dialects, “one Chinese,” and politics

• Strong thread on “Chinese” as one language vs many:
  • Linguistically, many “dialects” (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are mutually unintelligible.
  • In practice, they share a common written standard based on one spoken variety.
• Logographs allow cross-dialect reading of the same text even when pronunciations diverge, though vernacular written Cantonese or Shanghainese can be opaque without knowing those languages.
• Commenters highlight that labeling varieties as “languages” or “dialects” is often political rather than purely linguistic.

Learning difficulty, literacy, and reform

• Multiple people emphasize the enormous memorization load (thousands of characters) and say this makes literacy harder than alphabetic systems.
• Others argue the cultural depth and cross-dialect utility of characters explain their persistence and make large-scale script reform unlikely.
• Comparisons are drawn to English spelling reform and metric vs imperial: technically feasible, politically and culturally hard.