[guardiangod]

>It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component (indicating meaning).

That's because most people only know about the 2000 Chinese characters used in everyday situations, so they have this misunderstanding; Others who don't know Chinese heard this and keep on parroting it. If you know more about the language (post-seconadary level), you would know Chinese relies heavily on semantic component.

Here is an example characters I saw in Stanley, Hong Kong a few days ago (as part of a 2 lines poem.)

巍峩 vs the normal form 魏我

Normally the character 魏 means "Tower on an emperor's building" and 我 means "I". By adding the component 山 ("Mountain") to the characters, the words 巍峩 now carries a connotation of epicness one associate with mountain range. ie. "The building and I, as impressive as a mountain range."

[mistercow]

I'm a little confused by your comment. Are you saying that Chinese writing relies on a semantic component, but that this component is indecipherable to the vast majority of readers of Chinese? That does not sound very useful, especially when it comes to literacy.

[guardiangod]

>Are you saying that Chinese writing relies on a semantic component

I am saying _advance_ Chinese writing has a significant semantic component, but most speakers are not knowledgeable enough to realize it.

>That does not sound very useful, especially when it comes to literacy.

Most people can speak English; You probably need an advance English degree to understand all the puns/word plays in Shakespeare's works (or use Cole's Notes.)

The flexible of a language's intricate details has no direct relationship with the literacy of its speakers(or how easy to become proficient at an language to the point where one can communicate compound ideas with it.)

Back to how useful all these are- not really if you stick with the basic. They are as useful as Shakespeare's or Wordsworth's works in the modern world. You could speak/communicate perfectly fine in English even if you are not able to understand advance details of English literature, especially the vocab side.