CJK characters
Chinese is written almost exclusively in Chinese characters. It requires over 3,000 characters for general literacy, but up to 40,000 characters for reasonably complete coverage. Japanese uses fewer characters — general literacy in Japanese can be expected with 1,945 characters. The use of Chinese characters in Korea is becoming increasingly rare, although idiosyncratic use of Chinese characters in proper names requires knowledge (and therefore availability) of many more characters. However, even today, students in South Korea are taught 1,800 characters.
Lu Zhuangzhang
Lu's 1892 preface to the "Yimu liaoran chujie" explains the New Phonetic Alphabet's pragmatic advantages. 
Chinese characters are perhaps the most difficult of all characters in the whole world today…. Normally, when one writes poems and essays, one uses only a little over 5,000 of these characters. But if he wants to recognize these several thousand characters, even the most intelligent person will have to spend more than ten years of hard work. Herein lies the suitability of spelling. In my humble opinion, the wealth and strength of a nation are based on science; the advancement of science is based on the desire for learning and understanding principle of all men and women, young and old. Their being able to desire learning and understand principle is based on the spelling of words. Once they have become familiar with the letters and the methods of spelling, they can read any word by themselves without a teacher. Because the written and spoken word are the same, when they read with their mouths they comprehend in their hearts. Furthermore, because the strokes of the letters are simple, they are easy to recognize and easy to write, saving more than ten years of a person's life. This time may be dedicated to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and all kinds of practical learning. What worry would there then be for the wealth and strength of the nation? In the whole world today, except for China, all the other nations mostly use 20 or 30 letters for spelling... Therefore, in the civilized nations of Europe and America, all men and women over the age of ten, even in remote villages and isolated areas, are able to read... What is the reason for this? It is because they spell their words, because the written and the spoken word are the same, and because the strokes of the letters are simple... That men and women of foreign nations all can read is due to spelling. (tr. Mair 2002)
The publication of Lu's work opened the floodgates for new systems of Chinese transliteration, and inspired others to develop 29 phonetic schemes between 1892 and 1910 (Kaske 2008: 152-158, Theobald 2011). When Lu later supervised a language school in colonial Taiwan, he realized the flaws with his "Qieyin Xinzi" and attempted to redesign the system on the basis of the Japanese "kana" syllabary, but there were already too many competing schemes (Tsu and Elman 2014: 134).