Chinese: Simplify Characters Complicate Comprehension

When the PRC decided to "simplify" written Chinese, they often made it more complicated and inefficient instead. By merging many characters, each multiple character word/phrase could take on many times more unrelated meanings. Thus, the writer may have an easier task, but the reader's brain must do more work. A writer usually writes once, but for many readers.

There is information in vision, and perception differs between vision and hearing. The Chinese language is based on visual comprehension of what are essentially pictorial representations of meanings. By merging characters that sound the same in Mandarin, they have merged many meanings into each character and at the same time discarded much of the visual information.

To illustrate this point, write something lengthy in Chinese characters and the same in pīnyīn. Then, give each to a separate group of people. Test them on comprehension after a short interval. I would expect, after normalizing for other influencing factors, that the characters group would do better. While the difference between traditional and simplified Chinese may not be as great, I expect there to be a difference as well. One way to test this would be to have some highly complex in meaning but concisely written text in both traditional and simplified form and give each to separate groups. I expect to see a difference in comprehension after normalizing.