Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandari

Plenty of mainlanders can read fanti FYI. Writing is harder as that requires active memory and practice but fanti is perfectly decipherable for a fluent mandarin speaker. And when in doubt using a dictionary is trivial. If the text is digital you can pretty much get a 1-1 mapping 99% of the time. Especially if it is putonghua (as opposed to dialect) Obviously something as big as the introduction of jianti is quite radical and will have downsides but it's really overplayed by armchair spectators. For a fluent speaker it is at most an inconvenience - like reading chaucer or shakespeare, except the grammar is exactly the same only the spelling differs.