One big advantage of an ideographic writing like Chinese is that the link between text and the language proper is, in fact, much weaker than it is in the case w

One big advantage of an ideographic writing like Chinese is that the link between text and the language proper is, in fact, much weaker than it is in the case with letters which more or less represent the way the language sounds, and so the same text could potentially be understood by speakers of different languages who happen to share the same writing system. In theory (perhaps not quite in practice), then, it should suffice for an English speaker to know the meaning of Chinese characters to be able to read and understand a text without knowing any Chinese proper. (It helps that ideograms are easier to remember that seemingly random sequences of letters.)