[bluquark]

In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV.

In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.