Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair.<p>It&#x27;s true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it&#x27;s very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It&#x27;s notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don&#x27;t actually use.<p>I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.<p>No, they can&#x27;t just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It&#x27;d be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.<p>Yes, it was a terrible mistake to &quot;simplify&quot; the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it&#x27;s just not true.<p>At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they&#x27;re fun and interesting playgrounds. I don&#x27;t really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it&#x27;s interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that&#x27;s stalling &quot;development&quot;, I&#x27;m OK with that.