> Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin o

> Even the most basic "alphabetization" is based on strokes of the characters I guess? That is one way characters and words can be ordered. Another is pinyin order. > And Pinyin is mind boggling to me. It’s the English alphabet without “v”. What’s mind boggling about it? > I have this sense that touch screens and the smartphones must have had an outsized impact on societies with character based languages, with prediction making it orders of magnitude easier to enter text. IMHO, computers had the outsized impact on printing and publishing in general. I think smartphones and touch screens just built on that. The prediction stuff is nice, but I don’t think it had as big of an impact as computer text in general. Big for sure, but not as big. I guess it depends on the evaluation heuristics. > Chinese means you can fit a ton more info onto a screen Yes. Chinese can be very information dense. It feels faster to read than English, and I’m a fast reader in English. > AND there's no need for icons, as the entire written language is basically icons. Hmmm… I’m not sure I would frame it that way. The characters are logograms. Icons are ideograms. They are different. > That means learning how to use apps and menus is marginally easier. Definitely not the case at all in my experience.