Should China get rid of its writing system? David Moser, a consultant to CCTV in Beijing, submitted this article to CDN, explaining his view that the cumbersome nature of the Chinese writing system results in enormous hidden costs to society, such as: (1) added years spent in grade school learning two systems, the characters and pinyin (2) the burden of character processing in cyberspace, which is slow, memory-intensive, and unreliable (3) the lack of indexes in non-fiction books and scholarly materials (4) the problems of ordering and searching characters, resulting in a lack of phone books in Beijing, for example (5) highly literate adults losing the ability to write the characters because of their complexity, etc.
The 17-page article is attached here in PDF format. Download file
