[2020-01-24]为什么中国仍是少数没有改用字母书写的国家之一？

Sadao Ikebe (池辺 貞郎) , lives in Japan
Because Chinese writing system is actually better than phonetic alphabet system.
"Switch to phonetic alphabet" is an obsolete idea. The current trend is opposite....

Sadao Ikebe (池辺 貞郎) ，住在日本
因为汉语书写系统实际上比拼音系统要好。
“切换到拼音字母”是一个过时的想法。目前的趋势正好相反。我们鼓励大家在日常生活中多用汉字。如果当前的趋势继续下去，汉字将永远不会被废除，正相反，一些语言将会采用汉字。
在过去，我们有计算能力非常有限的计算机或设备，无法处理数千个字符。一些国家的教育资源非常有限，所以他们认为他们的孩子学不起成千上万的汉字。所以有些人想要废除使用汉字是可以理解的。
现在的情况完全不同了。机器处理汉字已经没有问题了。教育系统已经成熟，能够实现接近100% 的识字率。所以没有理由转变成拼音字母上。

People are increasingly becoming aware of the advantage of Chinese characters. These are some of the advantages of Chinese characters:
1) Chinese characters can be understood almost instantly, because they are logograms, which is not so different from pictograms. Given this picture:
What came up in your mind? This pictogram has lots of information. With chinese characters, everything is apparent like this pictogram, once you take a glance at the characters. We have equivalent of "Pictogram common language which has the ability to descr0ibe almost all possible ideas on humanity"
For example, Japan employs both Chinese characters and phonetic alphabet in their writing system at the same time. However, road signs in Japan are mostly in Chinese characters because reading speed is crucial. They know Chinese characters are faster to understand. Their phonetic alphabet isn't widely used in road signs.

人们越来越意识到汉字的优势。 以下是汉字的一些优点:
1)汉字几乎可以立刻被理解，因为它们是象形文字，与图画没有太大区别。这里有张图片：
你想到什么了？这个图画含有大量的信息。对于汉字来说，所有的字都像这个图画一样明显，只要你看一眼这些汉字。我们有等效于“象形文字的共同语言，它能够描述几乎所有关于人类的可能想法”
例如，日本在书写体系中同时使用汉字和音标字母。然而，由于阅读速度至关重要，日本的路标大多是汉字。他们知道汉字理解起来更快。他们的音标字母并没有被广泛用于路标。

2) The characters contain meanings not sounds, so we can communicate beyond the language boundaries. It's another advantage of pictogram and humanity use it everywhere like airports, etc.
3) People have access to their own history.
4) Far less need to consult dictionary when it comes to technical, medical, jurisdictional terms. Elementary learners cannot understand the word “felony” or “diabetes” while “重罪(=heavy crime)” or “糖尿病(=sugar urine disease)” only contain fairly basic characters. It's crucial for Korean native speakers, because once they buy something in drug store, they sometimes have to consult dictionaries when they want to read medical descr1iption. In China or Japan, it never happens because chinese characters have meaning. Dictionaries of native tongue is exclusive to scholarly usage, in China or Japan.

2)汉字包含的是意义而不是发音，所以我们可以超越语言的界限进行交流。这是象形文字的另一个优点，人们在任何地方都使用象形文字，比如机场等。
3)人们可以了解到他们自己的历史。
4)当涉及到技术、医学、司法术语时，就不用太查字典了。初学者不能理解“felony（重罪）”或“diabetes（糖尿病）” ，而汉字“重罪”或“糖尿病”只包含相当基础的字符。这对于以韩语为母语的人来说是至关重要的，因为一旦他们在药店里买了一些药，当他们想要阅读用药说明的时候，有时就必须查字典。在中国和日本，这种情况从来没有发生过，因为汉字是含有意义的。在中国或日本，母语的词典只用于学术用途。

5) Chinese characters are easier to learn if you start learning it younger. Because each characters have meanings, kids actually acquire them very quickly, than the meaningless phonetic one. My 2 year old son reads around 1500 characters already. In fact, Japan has higher literacy than neighbors thanks to the characters with meaning.
South Korea is reviving chinese character education in their elementary school system. Currently, educated Korean are able to read some 500 to 1000 Chinese characters. In the future, it's predictable that the number increases to 1500 or so because they start learning younger. 1500 is sufficient for daily life use. North Korea has never stopped Chinese character education because Kim Il-Sung wanted to do so. Mainland China proposed to switch to pinyin writing system, which failed. They wanted further simplification of hanzis, which also failed. Japan has been expanding their "Ordinary used character list (Joyo Kanji list)" again and again. This means they are using actually more Chinese Characters than before. Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc ... Still using traditional system and has no intention to switch to simplified one. Nowadays, thanks to computer systems, typing traditional characters requires exactly same amount of time compared to simplified one. Clearly, trend is to use more Chinese characters, not less.

5)如果你从小就开始学习汉字，那么汉字就更容易学习。因为每个汉字都有意义，孩子们实际上很快就能理解它们，而不是无意义的音标。我两岁的儿子已经可以读大约1500个汉字了。事实上，由于有意义的汉字，日本的识字率比邻国韩国要高。
韩国正在他们的小学系统中复兴汉字教育。 目前，受过教育的韩国人能够读懂大约500到1000个汉字。 在未来，可以预见的是，这个数字会增加到1500左右，因为他们开始学习的年龄更小。1500个汉字足够日常使用了。而朝鲜从未因为金日成的意愿而停止汉字教育。中国大陆曾提议改用拼音书写系统，但失败了。他们也曾希望进一步简化汉字，但也失败了。日本一直在不断扩大他们的“常用汉字表”。这意味着他们使用的汉字比以前更多了。香港，台湾等... 仍然使用传统的汉字系统，并没有打算转换到简化的汉字系统。如今，由于计算机的发展，输入繁体字所需的时间与输入简体字所需的时间完全相同。所以显然，目前的趋势是使用更多的汉字，而不是更少。

Theoretically, humanity needs better writing system. What is better one? The better writing system should bring out human's ability into use. Chinese characters requires several tables in your mind: "picture <-> meaning" "picture <-> phonetics" "writing stroke <-> meaning" so it's a huge investment. Humanity is capable of doing this. The return on the investment is really high. In the developed countries, we can afford that investment. Humanity has reached a point where we can afford complex table for every citizen to accelerate faster and deeper communication. Why don't we do this? Chinese character have exactly every aspect of what we need on "next generation's writing system."
TL;DR, Stop arguing of abolishing Chinese characters. It's time to argue how we can utilize more out of Chinese characters.

从理论上讲，人类需要更好的书写体系。那么什么是更好的？好的书写系统应该能够发挥人的能力。汉字在你的脑海中需要几个表： “图画<->意义”，“图画<->语音” ，“书写<->意义”，所以这是一个巨大的投资。但人类能够做到。这项投资的回报确实很高。 在发达国家，我们负担得起这种投资。人类已经发展到了这样的程度：我们可以为每个公民提供这个复杂的表，以加速更快、更深入的交流。我们为什么不这么做呢？汉字完全符合我们“下一代书写系统”所需要的方方面面。
停止废除汉字的争论。是时候讨论如何更好地利用汉字了。
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Riccardo Battilani , B.A. Chinese, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (2015)
I saw the other answers to this question and I can see this question badly needs an academic answer.
They kept it because of historical forces (tradition) and because it works very well with their language.
The top answer suggests that the moving towards alphabets is “outmoded”, and that the trend is towards logographic systems because they’re more intuitive, and that anyone can understand Chinese characters because they carry meaning and not sound. These are some of the most widespread misconceptions about the Chinese writing system out there.

Riccardo Battilani ，中文学士，威尼斯卡福斯卡里大学(2015)
我看到了这个问题的其他回答，我认为这个问题急需一个学术性的答案。
他们保留汉字是因为历史的力量(传统) ，也因为汉字与他们的语言非常协调。
最上面的答案说，使用字母表的趋势已经“过时了” ，使用表意文字系统是因为它们更直观，任何人都能理解汉字，因为它们带有意义，而不是发音。这些都是人们对中文书写系统最普遍的误解。

First, it’s not true that Chinese characters each have a univocal meaning-character connection. Pretty much all characters have more than one meaning which is in no way predictable from the form of the character itself. When someone who speaks a language written with an alphabetic orthography hears a new word, he can know with reasonable certainty how the word is spelled, if not what it means. When a Chinese speaker hears a completely new word, he can know neither what it means or how it’s written.
Moreover, such a system only works well with an isolating language. One only need look as far as Japanese to see how a logographic system is totally unsuited to morphologically complex languages. Both Japanese and Korean were once written entirely with Chinese characters, and both eventually rejected them (partially in the case of Japanese) in favour of an alphabetic (Korean) or syllabic (Japanese) system.

首先，并不是每个汉字都是单一的字-义关系。几乎所有的汉字都有一个以上的含义，这从字符本身的形式无法预测。当使用字母拼写的的语言的人，听到一个新单词时，如果不知道它的意思，但他可以确定这个单词是如何拼写的。当一个说汉语的人，听到一个完全陌生的单词时，他既不知道它的意思，也不知道它是怎么写的。
此外，这样的系统只适用于分析语。 只要看看日语，就知道表意文字系统完全不适合形态复杂的语言。 日语和韩语都曾经完全使用汉字书写，但最终都抛弃了它们(一部分的日语)，转而使用字母(韩语)或音节(日语)系统。

Vietnamese, despite being an isolating language very suited to Chinese characters, has nonetheless rejected them in favour of the Latin alphabet.
I love Chinese characters (my first major was Chinese after all), but this exoticisation irks me to no end.
The truth of the matter is the Chinese system is difficult to learn, far from perfect, and there’s always been a push within China to scrap it in favour of an alphabetic system, but tradition holds it back, as well as the enormous difficulty that would be incurred in attempting such a switch. In the end, the system works very well for Chinese, and there’s no real reason to scrap it, but it’s definitely not any better than any other writing systems.

尽管越南语是一个非常适合汉字的分析语，但越南人还是拒绝使用汉字，转而使用拉丁字母。
我喜欢汉字(毕竟我的第一个专业是中文) ，但这种异国情调让我一直感到烦恼。
事实上，中文体系很难学习，远非完美，而且中国国内一直在推动废除它，换成字母系统，但是传统阻碍了这举措，以及试图进行这样的转变会导致巨大的困难。最后，中国人使用这个系统很适合，没有真正的理由去废除它，但它肯定不比其他任何书写系统好。
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Youji Hajime , studied Economic History at Graduate School Education
Being able to pronounce writing is not the same as reading if reading means comprehension. And, in this respect, the alphabet system falls very short.
In English, the word “peritonitis” would be an obscure medical word, while in Japanese (or Chinese), the meaning is immediately apparent to anyone with basic school education as it is written in characters as “stomach sheet (in)flame” (腹膜炎). Similarly, the word “Ideogram” in kanji is “Express Meaning Letter” (表意文字). “heteroscedasticity” is “Uneven” “Scattered” “Characteristic” (分散不均一性). “Mens rea” is 故意　(deliberate intent). These words in English are all “Greek” (or Latin) in a literal and metaphorical sense to the vast majority of English speakers, while it is easily comprehended by Japanese or Chinese persons who have gone through compulsory education.

Youji Hajime 在研究生院学习经济史
如果阅读意味着理解，那么能发音书写不意味着能阅读。而且，在这方面，字母系统还很不完善。
在英语中，“peritonitis（腹膜炎）”这个词是一个很晦涩的医学词汇，而在日文(或中文)中，这个词的意思对任何受过基础教育的人来说都是显而易见的，因为它被写成了“胃的膜着火了”。同样，“ Ideogram”汉字是“表意文字”，“heteroscedasticity”是“分散不均一性”，“Mens rea”是“意图”。对于绝大多数说英语的人来说，这些英语单词在字面意义和隐喻意义上都是“希腊语”(或拉丁语) ，而经历过20世纪义务教育的日本人或中国人则很容易理解这些单词。

In reality, vast majority of adult English speaker only have level of functional vocabulary equivalent to Japanese (and Chinese) 13~15 years old or less. In English, average vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 20,000 words for active use and 40,000 for passive use.[*] That is a lot of spelling to memorise. For Japanese, the level of literacy is set by the number of characters because most vocabulary is constructed from characters and its combined meanings are pretty much as-it-says easy to comprehend. And there are ONLY 2136 official kanji and another additional about 1000 characters for passive use. Combined, it allows the level of vocabulary equivalent to the highly educated elite in West who, in the past, received classical education in both Greek and Latin.

事实上，绝大多数英语成年使用者的功能词汇水平，只相当于13ー15岁或更小的日本人(和中国人)。在英语中，一个说英语的成年人的平均词汇量：主动使用约20000个词，被动使用约40000个词。要记住的拼写太多了。对于日本人来说，读写水平是由字数决定的，因为大多数词汇都是由字组成的，而且汉字的组合意义也很容易理解。且只有2136个正式汉字和另外约1000个被动使用的汉字。综合起来，汉字所提供的词汇水平，相当于西方受过高等教育的精英阶层，他们在过去接受过希腊语和拉丁语的古典教育。

Till the late 20th century, writing based on characters were seen as an inferior system because typing and printing were extremely labour intensive process and were seen as a major obstacle to mass communication through text. Still, printing books or official documents for mass distribution was not too much of an issue even in East as the hassle of typesetting can be offset by the scale of mass production. What the East couldn’t match was speed. West could use typewriters in everyday office communication. In the East, a mechanical typewriter for Chinese or Japanese looks like below. Trained specialists who memorised the location of +3000 odd characters manually select the correct type to print in. It was barely faster than handwriting so it never had mass adoption in the East.

直到20世纪末，有人把以文字为基础的书写视为一个次等的系统，因为打字和印刷是极其劳动密集的过程，并视为大众传播的主要障碍。尽管如此，即使在东方，印刷书籍或官方文件进行大规模分发也不是什么大问题，因为排版的麻烦可以被量产规模所抵消。 东方所无法相比的是速度。 西方可以在日常办公室交流中使用打字机。在东方，中国或日本的机械打字机看起来是这样的。 训练有素的专家，能够记住3000多个字符的位置，手动选择正确的打印文字。但它的速度只比手写体快一点点，所以机械打字机在东方从未被大规模采用。

In West, a manager could simply dictate document to his secretary (who knew shorthand), then she later typed it up (or secretary could just draft a document by herself), then the manager could simply sign the document after a quick review. The emergence of corporate bureaucracy was possible in the West because of this conveyer belt of document production. (Also, photocopier had a huge effect as well as facsimile and then email……).
Then in 1978, Toshiba launched JW-10, the first-word processor in Japanese. It cost about 6.3 million yen, which is about 9.3 mil yen (equivalent of USD 83,000) for today’s price but it was a massive hit. The price also dropped very quickly as other manufacturers joined in, with more advanced version costing 2 million yen in 1980 and only 160,000 yen ($2K) in 1985. By late 1980, pretty much every office in Japan was using it, solving the major issue of using characters in the information age.

在西方，经理可以简单地向他的秘书口述文件(秘书会速记) ，然后她再把文件打出来(或者秘书可以自己起草一份文件) ，然后经理可以简单地快速浏览后签署文件。在西方，公司官僚主义的出现是有可能的，因为这种传送带似的文件生产。(此外，复印机也产生了巨大的影响，以及传真和电子邮件...)
1978年，东芝推出了日本第一款汉字处理器 JW-10。 它的价格约为630万日元，相当于当今价格的930万日元(83000美元) ，但它是一个巨大的冲击。 随着其他制造商的加入，价格也迅速下降，在1980年推出了更先进的版本，价格是200万日元，在1985年只需要16万日元(2000美元)了。到1980年底，日本几乎所有的办公室都在使用它，解决了在信息时代使用汉字的主要问题。

Chinese soon quickly adopted the technology in the 90s, greatly aided by the previous adoption of Mandarin as a standard auxiliary language, and Pinyin as a standard way to express Chinese in Roman alphabet. So one could say Chinese and Japanese did adopt alphabet but to complement its system rather than to replace it.
Still, it takes about 1000 characters to achieve basic literacy in Japanese (which take up the entire 6 years of primary school education) and another 3 years in junior high school to acquire additional 1000 to achieve full literacy. For Korean, it takes about a week for children and a day or two for an adult foreign learner to learn hangul because the shape of the hangul alphabet mirrors the shape of mouth and tongue. So Korean represents another end of extreme efficiency.

在90年代，中国人很快就采用了这种技术，这大大得益于之前普通话作为标准辅助语言，拼音是用罗马字母表达汉语的标准方式。 因此，可以说中国人和日本人确实采用了字母表，但只是为了补充其体系，而不是取而代之。
尽管如此，要达到日本人的基本识字水平还需要1000个汉字(占据了整整6年的小学教育时间) ，而要达到完全识字水平还需要3年的初中教育。对于韩语来说，孩子们需要一周的时间来学习，而成年外国学习者只需要一两天的时间来学习，因为韩文字母的形状，反映了嘴和舌头的形状。 因此，韩语代表了另一种效率极端。

English seems to have the worst of both worlds. It still takes the whole primary school to be able to read or spell at a basic level because spelling is irregular. Anyhow, in modern society where primary school education is universal and higher education is a must, the advantage of using characters greatly outweigh the disadvantage. Yes, one must spend the entire compulsory education memorising characters. But the entire society achieves a level of comprehension for scientific, medical, legal and other technical terms.
So, in this digital age, why should Japan or China dumb down its writing system to the alphabet system? It would only produce a mass of functionally illiterate adults who can pronounce words but can’t really read.
On Hangul Supremacy & Exclusivity – Korea’s High Functional Illiteracy

英语似乎是这两个语言世界中最糟糕的。由于拼写不规则，它仍然需要整个小学的学习才能达到基本水平的阅读或拼写。无论如何，在现代社会小学教育是普及的，高等教育是必须的，使用汉字的优势大大超过劣势。是的，一个人必须花费整个义务教育去记忆汉字。 但是这样整个社会都会达到对科学、医学、法律和其他技术术语的理解水平。
那么，在这个数字时代，为什么日本或中国要把它的书写系统简化成字母系统呢？这只会产生一大批半文盲成年人，他们只会发音但不会真正的阅读。
《论韩国的谚文至上与纯谚文主义》——韩国的功能性文盲（泛指不具备阅读实用文章，如报纸、菜单、商品介绍、征聘广告等能力的成年人）
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Alex McCutcheon , Presenter at HKSTV
Chinese characters are by far the most elegant writing system humans have produced. It's not without its quirks, but its information density, speed of reading, and general beauty is, in my opinion, unmatched. The concept of a pictogram decoupled from pronunciation means that as phonetics changed over the years, as they do in every language, the characters didn't have to be redesigned. And as regional varieties diverged, written texts remained accessible to speakers of all the dialects, providing a direct link to history and a common thread throughout what was only a few decades ago a disparate nation. Imagine asking your average English speaker to read anything older than Shakespeare, or something written in Danish or Icelandic. This is the beauty of Chinese characters. Even Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (depending on age and level of education) can have a basic conversation using a pen and some scrap paper, without knowing a lick of each other's spoken language, simply due to the consistency and stability of their common writing system. Oh, and it's not THAT hard to learn, but it does take some time if you're an adult, and perhaps a whole lifetime of you're not at all interested in how it works. But for most kids the symbolism and the elegance of the system are more than enough to ensure smooth acquisition along with the spoken language.

Alex McCutcheon 、HKSTV节目主持人
汉字是迄今为止人类创造的最优雅的书写体系。它是很古怪，但是它的信息密度，阅读速度，以及整体的美感，在我看来，是无与伦比的。象形文字与发音脱钩的概念意味着，每种语言随着时间的推移，语音都会发生变化，但汉字不必重新设计。随着地域差异的扩大，书面文字对所有方言的使用者来说，仍然是可以理解的，它提供了与历史的直接联系，并且为几十年前还是一个完全不同的国家形成了一条共同的联系。 想象一下，让使用英语的普通人阅读任何比莎士比亚更古老的作品，或丹麦语或冰岛语的作品。 这就是汉字的魅力所在。即使是中国人、日本人和韩国人(取决于年龄和教育水平)也可以用一支笔和一些纸进行基本的对话，只是因为他们有共同的稳定书写体系，而不需要了解对方的口语。哦，这并不难学，但是如果你是一个成年人，这确实需要一些时间，也许一辈子你都不会对它的工作方式感兴趣。但是对于大多数孩子来说，这个系统的象征意义和优雅，足以保证他们顺利地掌握口语。
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Robert Maxwell
Because there’s no real reason to, aside from ancillary romanization systems like Zhuyin (a semi-syllabary) and Pinyin.
Chinese students learn characters perfectly well. Areas dominated by Chinese characters (like Hong Kong and Taiwan) have high rates of literacy, and other areas where Chinese characters are heavily used (Japan) have some of the highest rates of literacy in the world. Mainland China’s literacy is relatively lower not because of the use of characters, but because education on the current scale is relatively new. Even then, literacy has been increasing sharply. So there’s no real argument for an alphabet-based writing system on a literacy basis.
The various arguments that Chinese characters “keep the Chinese sedate” or “impede free thought,” or other such inanity is just nonsense.

Robert Maxwell
因为除了辅助性的罗马字母系统如注音(半音节)和拼音之外，没有真正合理的理由这样做。
中国学生的汉字学得很好。以汉字为主的地区(如香港和台湾)的识字率较高，而其他大量使用汉字的地区(日本)的识字率在世界上是最高的。中国大陆的识字率相对较低，并不是因为使用了汉字，而是因为目前的教育规模相对较新。即便如此，中国大陆的受教育程度也在急剧提高。 所以，在以识字为基础上，建立一个字母系统是没有什么真正意义的。
那些认为汉字“使中国人保持安静”或“阻碍自由思想”或其他诸如此类的空洞论点，完全是胡说八道。

As a foreigner who learned Chinese after he became an adult, I can also tell you that learning characters isn’t an impossible task. It’s hard at the beginning, sure, and there’s more of a learning curve, perhaps, than learning to sound out, say, Russian or Greek, but still. So I don’t think a case exists for foreign learners—and that’s not even touching the fact that it’d be fairly bizarre for a country to change its language to make it easier for foreigners.
Chinese characters are pretty good, overall, I think. They have a high information density, they disambiguate well, they (more often than not) signal both phonetic and semantic values. And I’m not even going to get into the fact that maintaining Chinese characters as the prime mode of communication allows significant backwards compatibility: to read anything beyond perhaps the Late Qing, you’d have to learn characters anyway, since an alphabetic representation just wouldn’t work with Literary or Classical Chinese—in those registers, you require the visual disambiguation of characters.

作为一个成年后才学习汉语的外国人，我还可以告诉你，学会汉字并不是一件不可能的事情。当然，刚开始的时候确实很难，而且可能还有更多的学习曲线，也许，比学会说俄语或希腊语还要难，但仍然需要学习。因此，我不认为外国学生有这样的理由，这甚至都挨不着边：即要求一个国家改变其语言以便于外国人学习，这是相当奇怪的。
总的来说，我认为汉字相当不错。 它们有很高的信息密度，它们能够很好地消除歧义，它们(通常)能够同时表示发音和语义。我甚至不打算深入探讨这样一个事实：即汉字继续作为主要交流方式，可以带来显著的向后兼容性——要阅读晚清以前的任何东西，你都必须学习汉字，因为字母不适用于文言文或古典汉语，所以你需要在视觉上消除汉字的歧义。
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Alex Gorshkov , M Linguistics, Moscow State Linguistic University (1996)
Before I write my answer, I must say that I’m a native Russian knowing some Chinese, and I’m definitely struggling with the Chinese writing system, because my native writing system is an alphabet.
There are quite a lot of reasons that I see for the Chinese to not switch over to an alphabet:
* Phonetically Chinese language is syllable based rather than a separate sound based - each character is one syllable - easy; separating consonants and vowels will be a nightmare for over a billion of Chinese people, they just don’t see their language that way.

Alex Gorshkov 莫斯科国立语言大学 语言学硕士(1996)
在我写下我的回答之前，我必须说我是一个俄罗斯本地人，懂一些中文，而且我确实在汉字的书写系统中挣扎，因为我的母语书写系统是字母表。
在我看来，中国人为什么不改用字母表有很多原因：
* 中文的发音是以音节为基础的，而不是以单独的发音为基础，每个汉字都是一个音节，很简单；但区分辅音和元音，对于超过十亿的中国人来说也是一场噩梦，他们只是不这样看待他们的语言。

* There’s also a historical reason - using the same scr1ipt as was used hundreds of years ago makes sure modern people can read ancient texts, because all the Chinese have meaning, apart from pronunciation, imagine you could read Beowulf as if it were written in modern English!!! The Chinese can read their ancient texts, although certainly the pronunciation was different back than.
There’s a way to write in Chinese using a Latin alphabet, it’s called Pinying, but even I find Pinying writing very uncomfortable for the Chinese language, I prefer Chinese historical writing system.

* 还有一个历史原因，使用和几百年前同样的文字可以确保现代人可以阅读古代文本，因为除了发音，所有的汉字都有意义，想象一下你可以像读现代英语一样读《贝奥武夫》！！中国人可以阅读他们的古代文献，虽然发音肯定不同。
有一种用拉丁字母书写汉字的方法，叫拼音，但我发现即使是用拼音来书写汉字也很不舒服，我更喜欢汉字的历史书写体系。
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Partha Shakkottai , former Engineer Retired (1969-2015)
Chinese and Japanese are too difficult to Indo-european people with a very structured grammar and exact rules of pronunciation (except english). At least , that is my belief. There are also too many characters for writing in Chinese and they are not phonetic.
The characters are useless for freeway signs. They are too dense and hard to see.
But of course China need not switch to an alphabet for our convenience!

Partha Shakkottai 、退休工程师(1969-2015)
对于印欧人来说，汉语和日语太难了，他们的语法结构非常严密，发音规则也非常准确(英语除外)。 至少，我是这样想的。书写的汉字也太多，而且不是语音的。
这些字符对于高速公路上的标志来说毫无用处。它们太密集了，很难看清。
但当然，中国不需要为了我们的方便而改用字母表！
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Robert Stodieck , former Strategic Marketing Mgr at Panasonic Semiconductor (1996-1999)
Why would they bother? The Chinese just use the English alphabet when it is useful. The evolution of the computer has removed much of the labor of writing complex characters.

Robert Stodieck 曾任松下半导体战略营销经理(1996-1999)
他们何必要自找麻烦？中国人只是在需要的时候才会使用英文字母。计算机的进化已经消除了许多写复杂文字的工作。
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SJ Thomas , Calligrapher, Artist, Designer, History aficionado
China has a perfectly good phonetic system in the form of the Latin alphabet-based Hanyu ‎Pīnyīn. In fact, if phonetic systems were to work on their own, Pinyin should have replaced the non-phonetic Chinese characters by now.
There are several reasons why the Chinese characters remain the dominant form of writing Chinese:

SJ Thomas 、书法家、艺术家、设计师、历史爱好者
中国有一个非常好的以拉丁字母为基础的汉语拼音系统。事实上，如果拼音系统能够独立工作的话，拼音早就应该取代非拼音的汉字了。
汉语仍然是以汉字书写为主要形式，有以下几个原因：

* Homonyms: a feature of all forms of the Chinese language are the high incidence of homonyms. Even when tones are taken into account, there are scores of words that sound exactly alike. When listening to speech, context clues are sufficient to understand which word is being spoken. In writing, however, quickly distinguishing between many possible homonyms can slow down reading comprehension. In contrast to a phonetic system, each word has a separate character. Comprehension is instant.
* Layered meanings: Chinese has a relatively small vocabulary that is in common usage. By contrast, English has a relatively large vocabulary that is common usage. In both cases I am not counting technical, scientific and other specialty words, but rather the number of words used in typical written and spoken language. In this vocabulary, however, each word or character can have quite a number of meanings. Most words in Chinese have a range of possible meanings greater than almost any word in English. Just as a Chinese character makes it immediately clear what word is being referenced, so, too, that character immediately conjures up the layered meanings that have built up over the course of Chinese history.

* 同音异义词：汉语的一个特点是同音异义词发生的概率很高。即使把音调考虑在内，还是有许多单词听起来完全一样。在听演讲时，从上下文可以帮助我们理解演讲中所讲的单词。然而，在写作中，快速区分许多可能的同音异义词会减慢阅读理解的速度。与语音系统相反，每个汉字都有一个单独的字符。能够即时理解。
* 分层意义：汉语的常用词汇相对较少。相比之下，英语有相对较大的常用词汇量。在这两种语言中，我都没有计算技术、科学和其他专业词汇，而是计算了典型的书面和口头语言中使用的词汇数量。 然而，在这些词汇中，每个单词或字符都可以有相当多的意思。大多数汉语单词的可能含义的范围，比英语中的任何单词都要广。 正如一个汉字，人们可以立即清楚所指的是什么，而这个汉字也可以立即让人想起在中国历史进程中，建立起来的多层含义。

* Non-phonetic understanding: being non-phonetic, the characters offer two distinct advantages over a phonetic system. Clearly there are disadvantages as well, but for the moment let us concentrate on the advantages.
1) The characters function regardless of the pronunciation of a word in any local variant of the Chinese language. Indeed. they function across languages and language families. The characters can and have been used in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. Meaning is separate from pronunciation. Historically this has been a factor in maintaining political unity in China, and the ability to present all forms of the Chinese language as being closely tied together. Contrast this with Europe where languages as similar as French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are each counted as completely separate from one another.
2) Many people report that they read Chinese characters non-phonetically. That is, they do not sound out the words, but go straight to meaning. This is similar to some speed reading techniques taught for reading phonetic scr1ipts. If you see a word and parse that straight to meaning, without the intermediate step of sounding out the phonetics in your mind, the speed of reading and comprehension goes up.

*非语音理解：汉字是非语音的，与语音系统相比有两个明显的优点。当然也有缺点，但现在让我们集中讨论优点。
1、汉字的功能与汉字在任何地方变体的读音无关。的确如此，它们的功能跨越语言和语系。这些汉字能够并且已经在日本、韩国、越南和其他地方被使用过。意义与发音是分开的。 从历史上看，这是维持中国政治统一的一个因素，以及将各种形式的汉语紧密联系在一起的能力。相比之下，欧洲的语言，如法语、葡萄牙语、西班牙语和意大利语都被认为是完全独立的。
2、许多人说他们读汉字时没有发音。也就是说，他们不把单词读出来，而是直接进入意义。这类似于一些速读技巧。如果你看到一个单词，不需要在你的头脑中读出发音的中间步骤，而是直接解析到它的意义，那么阅读和理解的速度就会提高。

* History and culture: Chinese characters date back to the earliest forms of writing in what is today China. As such they bear strong historical and cultural weight. This intersects with the layered meanings mentioned above: over the course of history each character has accrued multiple meanings, and stories to explain how that character came to have such meanings. Each character is a potent symbol connecting all the thousands of years of Chinese history within itself. While this awareness may not be something that people feel consciously, the significance of using characters, the emphasis put on calligraphy, and the role of characters in Chinese art are all factors that indicate the potency of this form of writing.
* Education: Finally, one of the strongest arguments for abandoning the Chinese character system is literacy. In the face of that argument consider that China has been able to realize mass literacy while maintaining this form of writing (Japan, too, with one of the highest national literacy rates in the world, maintains a variety of intersecting and complex writing systems, including use of a subset of Chinese characters). The achievement of literacy while maintaining use of the characters means that the mass of Chinese people have direct access to reading books, documents and inscr1iptions from the past, and the satisfaction of being literate. Education is of preeminent value in Chinese culture, and being educated is closely tied to being able to read and write in the traditional system.

* 历史与文化：汉字可追溯到当今中国最早的书写形式。因此，它们具有很强的历史和文化影响力。 这与上面提到的分层含义交织在一起：在中国的历史进程中，每个字都产生了多重含义，并且用故事来解释这个字是如何产生出这些含义的。每一个汉字都是一个强有力的象征，连接着中国几千年的历史。虽然这可能不是人们有意识能感觉到的，但是使用文字的意义，对书法的重视，以及汉字在中国艺术中的作用，所有这些都表明了这种书写形式的潜力。
* 教育：最后，支持放弃汉字系统最有力的理由之一是——识字。面对这种论点，我认为中国已经能够在保持这种书写形式的同时，实现大众识字了(日本也是世界上识字率最高的国家之一，保持了各种相互交叉的复杂书写系统，包括使用一部分汉字)。在保持使用汉字的同时实现识字，意味着大部分的中国人民可以直接阅读过去的书籍、文献和碑文，并能够得到识字的满足感。教育在中国文化中具有突出的价值，在中国的传统文化中，受教育与识字息息相关。
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Anonymous
Human beings not only need bar code but also QR code, so Chinese keep it.

Anonymous
人类不仅需要条形码，还需要二维码，所以中国人保留了汉字。