I used to think the writing system was horrible as well, but it actually has a ton of advantages as well. Pros and cons, like anything else.
The cons of the written language far outweigh the pros. It can’t be denied that it takes far longer to learn than anything else.
It's true the writing system doesn't make it ideal for a global lingua franca, but one of the main advantages I appreciate about it is its ability to disambiguate common strings.
In the Latin+Hindu-Arabic numeral world, we tend to argue about the best way to write dates, everything from 99/9/19 to 2037.04.01 to 4/1 or 13/5/2003 to 5/15/2019. The ISO published a standard, people more or less try to follow it, but in common usage it is still fairly ambiguous.
Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日
Personally I find this to be beautiful in its simplicity. We tend to use a separator anyway, dots or slashes or dashes or what have you, but add one kanji as a suffix and nobody will argue about whether 4/5/2018 is April 5th or May 4th because 日 (once you've learned what it means) will clearly mark the day and 月 will clearly mark the month.
You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.
I wouldn't say all of written Chinese would make for a good lingua franca, but a limited subset seeing more use globally would be very cool.
2017Earth04Moon06Sun perhaps.
Or, we already have (but don't use) the astronomical symbols. Most people understand the male and female symbols.
I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.
>You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.
Or simply use the ISO standard, which I do and I will assume that people I communicate with understand ISO and parse it correctly. If they don't it's not my problem.
That's not the parent's point though -- if you know the characters, the meaning is immediate. Whereas 2018/02/04 remains opaque.
Great, now you have n+1 standards …
also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!
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Spanish is a much easier language. It has clear pronunciation rules, a more limited latin-based vocabulary and few grammar exceptions.
It's really not that hard. The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers. The fact that it's very analytic [1] is also helpful. I found Spanish harder because the numerous verb conjugations are too difficult to remember. My native language's conjugations are even harder, but luckily I've been learning it since I was a baby.
It seems that way because you only look or notice English content.