[FabHK]

It's not trivial - I would not want to read an English or German text written in IPA. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that it is quite possible to write Mandarin in some sort of alphabetic script quite easily.

What people have been doing in Chinese is basically write only one syllable of a multi-syllable word, which would be ambiguous in speech, but disambiguated in writing by the character. But then, if your writing were more phonetic, you'd just have to write the full word.

[pampa]

I don't quite understand what you mean. In modern standard mandarin it is pretty much one character = one syllable. They'd have to travel 3000 years back in time to recover the lost syllables.

[FabHK]

Yes, yes, absolutely.

My point is that written Chinese is much terser than spoken Chinese (particularly classical Chinese, of course) and that this is enabled by the disambiguation inherent in the characters. That is, where in spoken language you'd use a two-character word, when writing it would be sufficient to write just one character to evoke what's meant.

Now, if you were to write in some sort of alphabetical script, you'd just write the full two-syllable word.

[pampa]

Slighly offtopic. Our own languages start incorporating pictograms and hieroglyphs, there are a little over 1000 emoji codepoints. How many syllables do you need to spell out an emoji?

[vorg]

Virtually all languages use semantic digits to represent numbers. Just like the way you used "a little over 1000 emoji", instead of "a little over one thousand emoji". There's 10 "semantic" digits to the 26 "phonetic" letters on a keyboard.