The Koreans got tired of using this messy combination of sound and meaning, and came up with one of the simplest writing systems: Hangul. It is very easy to learn and has built-in mnemonics for the sounds.
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.)
With a bit of effort, most educated Chinese users can read and understand ancient texts up to 2000 years ago. We of course have no idea how those words were pronounced back then.
It's a pretty fun way to explain how Chinese writing works, without going for the Chinese symbols, highly evolved after a few millennia of use.
Were this text written in modern times, I suspect that instead of the lovely ball pen shapes the author could choose to use emoji, to make it more readily understandable! :)
This isn't exactly what the article is about, but I've noticed that English is becoming more like Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The rise of emoji, text-speak-shorthand and making communication more pictograms.
Korean is essentially a phonetic language now. Japanese is half, with only the Kanji part arguably derived from pictograms. Even Chinese writing is not really a pictogram system for the reasons outlined in the article. In practice, the majority of characters are constructed with a radical plus a phonetic component.
Also, by the way, the vast majority (if not all) "Asian" languages are phonetic unless they have Chinese influence.
