Editing Logogram (section)

== Advantages and disadvantages ==

=== Separating writing and pronunciation ===
The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. '''1''' is understood regardless of whether it be called ''one'', ''ichi'' or ''wāḥid'' by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different [[varieties of Chinese]] may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to a significant extent in writing even if they do not write in [[Vernacular Chinese|Standard Chinese]]. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing ({{lang|zh|[[筆談]]}}) was the norm of [[East Asia]]n international trade and diplomacy using [[Classical Chinese]].{{citation needed|date=April 2016}}{{dubious|date=April 2016}}

This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of [[Greek language|Greek]], [[Latin]], [[Italian language|Italian]], [[Spanish language|Spanish]], and [[Finnish language|Finnish]] make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Orthographies in some other languages, such as [[English orthography|English]], [[French orthography|French]], [[Thai orthography|Thai]] and [[Tibetan orthography|Tibetan]], are all more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. [[Hangul]], the [[Korean language]]'s writing system, is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic [[hanja]] in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul.{{citation needed|date=April 2016}}

According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the [[People's Republic of China]]'s "[[List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese|Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese]]" ({{lang|zh|现代汉语常用字表}}, ''Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo'') cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "[[Standard Form of National Characters|Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters]]" ({{lang|zh|常用國字標準字體表}}) by the Ministry of Education of the [[Republic of China]], while 4,759 in the "[[List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters]]" ({{lang|zh|常用字字形表}}) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of [[Hong Kong]], both of which are intended to be taught during [[Elementary school|elementary]] and [[Middle school|junior secondary]] education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters.<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.royalpalace.go.kr:8080/content/community/question/view.asp?seq=23&page=9&c1=&c2= |language=ko |title=현판 글씨들이 한글이 아니라 한자인 이유는? |work=RoyalPalace.go.kr |access-date=26 November 2017}}</ref>

=== Characters in information technology ===
Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to a practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various [[input method]]s for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the [[Cangjie input method|Cangjie]] and [[Wubi method]]s of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as [[Bopomofo]] or [[Pinyin]] where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered.{{clarify|date=November 2017|reason=What is "the Chinese alphabet system"? No such system has been mentioned yet.}}

Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, [[ISO 8859]] requires only one [[byte]] for each grapheme, while the [[Basic Multilingual Plane]] encoded in [[UTF-8]] requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word<ref>{{cite web |first=David |last=Hearle |title=Sentence and word length |url= http://hearle.nahoo.net/Academic/Maths/Sentence.html |publisher=self-published |access-date=27 May 2007}} {{self-published source|date=November 2017|certain=y}}</ref>{{self-published inline|date=November 2017|certain=y}} and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. [[Variable-width encoding]]s allow a unified character encoding standard such as [[Unicode]] to use only the bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that results merging large character sets with smaller ones.