[T-R]

> First, literacy isn't completely related to the writing system. Look at Spanish speaking countries, where the alphabet is more phonetic than the English alphabet.

Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate. [1]*

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf

* Not trying to cherry-pick for Japan being at the top, but Japan's not listed in the 2015 UNESCO report that's referenced all over the place. This US DoE report from 2013 seems legitimate enough.

[RandomOpinion]

> Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate.

While literacy might be high, there's been a stream of articles over the years in Japanese media noting that literacy in kanji (the component of Japanese based on Chinese characters) in particular has been steadily declining, even among the highly educated; e.g. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/03/national/kanji-w...

[T-R]

That's a fair point - seems related to the fact that people aren't writing as much anymore.

Anecdotally, I feel like Japanese picks a better point in the tradeoff space than other languages - Chinese characters are used where they get some leverage, with phonetics for everything else, even with a bunch of half-kanji words. Still, I'd imagine some of the less-commonly used ones will get dropped over time.

On the other hand, English+Emoji+Txt simplification seems to be approaching the same point from the other direction.