I&#x27;m skeptical of the &quot;quick to read&quot; argument.  An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood  of 5,000 characters (&quot;full literacy&quot; is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k).  Unless you&#x27;re a professional writer of some variety you&#x27;re going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.