> China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
Japan missed the chance too. You need to know those Chinese characters ("kanji" in Japanese) to be able to read, which is a shame since I never had the energy to learn them.
> If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese)
To be clear, I assume you mean the two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are used to support/supplement the Chinese characters in writing.
Sadly they did not give up the Chinese characters long ago.
This frustrates some Japanese people too, but most of all us foreigners, of course. They say that once you know kanji/hanzi, you'll appreciate their efficiency in conveying words and meanings though, but I wouldn't know anything about that.
Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them, and once you get over a certain threshold (probably around a thousand characters or so), you can generally understand most directions and signposts... anywhere in Japan, Taiwan, or China. Even though they all use different writing systems, a knowledge of any of the three is pretty valuable.
I'd never go as far as to say that I appreciate kanji/hanzi for its efficiency, because there isn't any, but there is a certain poetry to them that I do like.
> Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them
Yep, but I just didn't have the willpower/energy/interest.
I've heard from people who know kanji well, that when you read in kanji, you'll appreciate it how you can always quickly tell what something is roughly about, even before really reading it.
That's of course because the "pictures" convey meanings, and so on. I guess that can be called a certain kind of efficiency.
Japan missed the chance too. You need to know those Chinese characters ("kanji" in Japanese) to be able to read, which is a shame since I never had the energy to learn them.
> If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese)
To be clear, I assume you mean the two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are used to support/supplement the Chinese characters in writing.
Sadly they did not give up the Chinese characters long ago.
This frustrates some Japanese people too, but most of all us foreigners, of course. They say that once you know kanji/hanzi, you'll appreciate their efficiency in conveying words and meanings though, but I wouldn't know anything about that.