Efficiency of Chinese characters
By Vladimir Skultety, M.A., B.A.
A lot of people say that Chinese characters are inefficient, because they are too complicated and there is too may of them. By contrast they say that western alphabetic scripts are much easier to learn, much easier to write and are thus much more efficient.
In this article, I tried to somewhat objectively analyze the situation, which was a bit hard, because I like Chinese characters a lot, but either way I looked at it, I still think that characters are at least as efficient and in some cases even much more efficient than western alphabetic scripts.
Negatives:
- There’s a lot of them. I don’t like numbers but it is true, that you need to know at least 2500 – 3000 characters to read something. (Edit 5.5.2012 - strangely enough, after my study I found that you would actually only need about 2180 characters to read the newspaper)
- It’s much more difficult to remember characters compared to the simple 35 or so letters of an alphabetic script
- They are easy to forget
- They are easy to confuse
- You not only need to learn how to recognize them, you need to learn how to write them by hand which doubles your effort
- They are unpractical when you need to look up something in a list (dictionary, telephone list)
Positives:
