I agree with almost all of that, including that there's no similar decline in China. I wonder whether it's really "because of the writing system" though. As a c

I agree with almost all of that, including that there's no similar decline in China. I wonder whether it's really "because of the writing system" though. As a counter-argument: - We may have fewer individual symbols (letters) to memorise, but we still need to learn vocabulary in English. - In European languages with grammatical gender you have to memorise that too (in German, a fork is feminine but a spoon is masculine), same for languages with declensions. - And when you study something, you have all the technical terms in your field. - But you don't simply memorise (if you're clever) what inode, tail recursion, ACID, syscall etc. mean, you subconsciously construct a knowledge graph. - Chinese characters have structures and relationships too so you don't just have to memorise each one individually. For example, the character for "man" (as in "male") is a combination of person+field, I believe; whereas the word for "business" is apparently the compound buy+sell. So the "knowledge graph" argument still applies in China. - Children in school in China don't need to know all the charaters, they start off with a useful subset and learn (or look up in dictionaries) more as they go along.