ideograms

If Japanese ideograms and Chinese ideograms actually used different code points (i.e.

With a graphical browser, the images-of-text are ideograms I (ignorant westerner) do not understand, so the experience is the same.

Instead, a limited vocabulary of ideograms (up to a few hundred) are used to make rebuses of the words that don't have ideograms of their own, turning the ideograms into phonetics.

Subjectively, a chinese can understand Chinese ideograms while maybe he find written English difficult to understand.

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms.

This trend is encouraged by their third character set, of which you are required to know about 2000 ideograms before graduating high-school.

They wound [homograph] up mixing the two with Chinese ideograms setting the intended theme followed by phonetic kana to particularize pronunciation and grammar.

Print icons/ideograms on tickets, in addition and preferably next to ticket numbers.

Your mention of Kanji is particularly salient, as the blog post catches these skeuomorphic icons in the act of evolving from pictograms to ideograms...

Japanese (and Chinese) features intricate ideograms with up to (I think) 22 strokes per character.

I'm not convinced it can be done right, because alphabets are inherently superior to ideograms.

Take a standard human, and try to determine how many gestures, or how many different ideograms he is able to create and later recognize to identify different concepts.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are not metaphorical ideograms but part of a "true" phonetic writing system.

"Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs" - and we too use ideograms every day.

Edit: oups, I had read "English speaking" rather than "non-English"; with ideograms, it is actually quite obvious, thanks for the remark!

"A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other..." - I agree and I'm sure there are countless examples of poorly designed icons, but it doesn't invalidate the very concept of ideograms.

Ideograms are still fascinating because it seems to quickly increase the amount of things you can write with less space, but only if you're really able to read it and memorize it.