WHY ARE CHINESE LETTERS SO COMPLICATED?
Chinese characters are often criticized for being overly complex relative to other writing systems. One reason for the added complexity is the different information content of the characters. Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation, but no information on meaning. In contrast, Chinese characters give less precise (and sometimes no) pronunciation information, but do give information on meaning. This is very important in Chinese because of the huge number of characters in Chinese, which sound the same but have different meanings. More phonetic and semantic information could be contained in the characters with less complexity, much as the spelling of English could be both less complicated and more informative. For instance, all characters with the same pronunciation could be given the same phonetic component, with radicals used to differentiate meanings. The excess complexity arises because Chinese characters have gradually accumulated over several millennia, wit
