No, they are extremely similar. It’s the same system. The hardest hurdle for speakers of other languages is getting used to a different type of word recognition, which Chinese speakers do not have to do. Even the ones that have been simplified differently are very recognizable with a tiny amount of exposure. And the multiple reading thing is way overstated. I usually just see it used as an excuse for not actually reading or listening to the language.
No, they are extremely similar. It’s the same system. The hardest hurdle for speakers of other languages is getting used to a different type of word recognition, which Chinese speakers do not have to do. Even the ones that have been simplified differently are very recognizable with a tiny amount of exposure. And the multiple reading thing is way overstated. I usually just see it used as an excuse for not actually reading or listening to the language.
We have our thesis and our antithesis, now for the synthesis: kanji and hanzi are simultaneously more and less similar than you think
Quantum linguistics