China’s tyranny of characters
David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who&#x27;s argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics.<p>Case in point:<p>Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan&#x27;s literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic.<p>In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the &quot;complex&quot; traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don&#x27;t hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are.<p>As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.<p>All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language&#x27;s written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate.<p>So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it.<p>Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it&#x27;s just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It&#x27;s the people who forces down a way to use it that&#x27;s rigid.