One problem that I have with 中文 is that there’s too many kanji that have to be learned. While this doesn’t make it impossible for it spread beyond East Asia, it does slow it down substantially. A system that uses a smaller inventory of radicals, and generates all characters by combining them according to the meaning of each radical (as opposed to the phonetic wordplay that currently underlies the combination of radicals, which does not translate well into cultures not influenced by Chinese pronunciation) will be able to spread much faster than any current form of 中文.
Yeah - there’s a huge amount of characters that are the combination of some logogram with a phonetic marker. Memorizing these is about as hard as memorizing a short English word’s meaning purely from its shape if you disregard the sound.
One problem that I have with 中文 is that there’s too many kanji that have to be learned. While this doesn’t make it impossible for it spread beyond East Asia, it does slow it down substantially. A system that uses a smaller inventory of radicals, and generates all characters by combining them according to the meaning of each radical (as opposed to the phonetic wordplay that currently underlies the combination of radicals, which does not translate well into cultures not influenced by Chinese pronunciation) will be able to spread much faster than any current form of 中文.
Yeah - there’s a huge amount of characters that are the combination of some logogram with a phonetic marker. Memorizing these is about as hard as memorizing a short English word’s meaning purely from its shape if you disregard the sound.