Romanization will never be the way to reform. It was proposed and discussed many decades ago, but the proposal is regarded by many as a radical, inconsiderate or irrational today.
The obsolete reasons for romanization included:
1. it helped Chinese to increase literacy rate. It was extremely convincing, and many respectful scholars agreed that too, but Hong Kong and Taiwan experience proved that this argument is groundless. These rich regions also showed that how people can survive well with traditional writing system.
2. it helped chinese compatible with computer life, but the invention of Chinese encoding system and many chinese input methods solve the problem. Any reform on Chinese characters are for our next generation, who are also learning how to input chinese when they are very young.
Chinese characters may be still hard for learners, but language reform is not based on learners' needs, it's based on users themselves. In fact, if we can recognize a few thousand logos and trademarks, is it really difficult for learners to recoginze the basic 2000 chinese characters? It's, for me, so difficult to remember French and English vocab, it's a common problem to most learners who don't use the language frequently. I think it's the same to Chinese characters too.
IMHO, Characters are not necessarily bad things. Chinese dialects are as diversified as European language. If Roman created their own characters, modern EU would be able to cut back their expense on huge translation teams.
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