[mehmetemre]

Chinese is an isolating language, so it doesn't have affixes, conjugation etc. so they can use that kind of writing system.

In the other hand, English and lots of other languages (including my native language Turkish) are synthetic languages, so they have affixes, and they do not adapt well to logographic writing systems (class of Chinese characters) in my opinion (I am not an expert on linguistics). My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system.

Japanese is an interesting example in this case, it is a synthetic language and has conjugation etc. so Japanese people use Kanji (Chinese characters as used by Japanese) to write word root and Hiragana to write conjugation, function words, spelling etc.

[userulluipeste]

"My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system."

But that need to memorize IS a cognitive overhead that is hard to dismiss. The Japanese have to learn thousands of Kanji from their early years (of elementary school) till well into high-school! And I would say that the encoding/decoding is actually an overhead only until it gets automatized in subconscious mind.