&gt;or even guess the meaning of words when you see them<p>That&#x27;s the thing I don&#x27;t get. You may be able to guess the words, but would the characters allow you to pronounce it? In English, and most other languages, you can spell your way through pronouncing a word, even without knowing it&#x27;s meaning. Is that possible in Chinese or Japanese?<p>It also seems like you would need to be constantly updating computers to allow them of deal with new characters.<p>The argument that &quot;these characters aren&#x27;t widely used&quot; isn&#x27;t really helpful. The characters either exists or they don&#x27;t. Because you might need it in the future means that you need to deal with it&#x27;s existence. X isn&#x27;t a widely used letter in many language, so should we just throw it aside? In case of the biang it might be more akin to throwing out a word, because it&#x27;s rarely used, but still.