>#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. First of all, this isn't true. Every

>#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. First of all, this isn't true. Every convenience store in China sells pens. Billions of pens are sold per year in China. Even at the tech company where I worked in China, everyone had a pen or pencil and some wrote notes with them. People often used markers and wrote things on whiteboards, too. It was pretty much the same in that sense as English speaking places. Secondly, the main point in #3 wasn't about writing. It was about learning. If you see a few taquerias in Mexico with "Taqueria" written in the sign, you'll learn a new word and how to pronounce it. You might later realize you've been hearing the word "taqueria" in a radio commercial and suddenly understand more of it. In China, you could enter a post office, see 郵局 written on it and hear the word 郵局 in conversation every day for a month and still not understand what it is people are saying. That is why the writing system slows learners down, even if comprehension is their goal.