Bad Character

I never learned anything in the Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to attend as a child, but that's not what motivates my choice here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor performance in those classes--my resentment at having to miss the "Super Friends" cartoon being just one of them--so I don't blame Chinese characters for my failure. No, my objection is a practical one: I'm a fan of literacy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to literacy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn three thousand.