Re: Chinese writing systems

> Same point about speech. If there is no problem with comprehension of the
> spoken form, there should be no problem with comprehension of the written
> form if it accurately records the spoken form. The thing is, the
ideographic
> system *doesn't* do that. Yet people understand it anyway - after their
> difficult learning process.
It seems to me you are making the common mistake of thinking your own system
is the best for all.  Clearly, from what Florian said, Chinese comprises
many non-mutually comprehensible dialects united by an ideographic script.
If the speech were the same for all Chinese-speakers, your suggestion would
be valid, but unless you propose fragmenting a language into thousands of
pieces, the current system is the best one for its purpose.  In the case of
English, which I assume is your L1, many people speek basically the same
words with comparitively small "accent" variations.  Even an American can
understand an Australian, whose vowels have totally different values from
American English.  This may partly be because we use a phonetic script.  In
China, this simply isn't the case.  Two people may read the same character
completely differently, but still be able to correspond in writing.  In
that, the ideographic system has benefits ours lacks.
Also, "the written form acurately reflecting the spoken form":
interlinguistic comprehension is not so clear-cut with the roman alphabet.
Think of the simple sentence in German, "Ich spreche Deutsch," (I speak
German), and compare it in its sounds to the english spelling of similar
sounds.

Jake