One would think they are considerable. Can they be defined? Our children only have to learn twenty-six letters. Are they not at a serious disadvantage?
Are Chinese adults, as a consequence of their writing system, more productive than we are?
As Bruce Bower, writing in Science News Magazine on December 12, 2005, reports, important work has been done in this area.
“Learning to read 2,500 pictorial symbols, as Chinese students do in grade school, yields a 5-point advantage on IQ tests, compared with the scores of Westerners whose languages are based on alphabets, according to a new analysis of mental capabilities of Greek and Chinese children. The international team of analysts, led by psychologist Andreas Demetriou of the University of Cyprus in Nicosia, attributes the scoring disparity to a superiority in visual and spatial tasks that comes with learning to read Chinese.”
One wonders whether anybody has any idea how we can catch up.
Eric Koch’s new book, New Beginnings, was launched on September 20. The book is available from 
There are other advantages to the Chinese writing system. China has united a huge proportion of humankind more or less into a single culture; no other state has ever done this so successfully over such a long period. One of the explanations lies in the use of ideograms for writing instead of symbols that represent sounds.No matter what language a person SPEAKS in China, everyone READS and WRITES the same one. Imagine how much easier the unification of Europe would be if it had a single written language.
I’ve no doubt that the effort in concentration needed for young children to learn Chinese pictograms (they apparently start at age 4) is a real benefit. The downside of the Chinese system (and in general the Oriental point of view with regard to education) is the lack of emphasis on original thinking, on independence of mind. The emphasis is on memory. This has a long-term effect on creativity, When my son, an MIT student, was on a school-sponsored trip to Japan, one of the things the students he met there wanted most to know involved the ability to have their own ideas and be free to express them to their professors In their world, this was an unknown.”liberty.” (Just to stay on topic here, Japanese and Korean students are also exposed to Chinese pictograms, although not to the same extent).
But whether this makes up for the eventual Chinese adult’s ability to be productive, ?????
And I would like to throw out here the suggestion that learning to decipher music notation is a great benefit for Western children. For all the same reasons. Chinese pictograms are not the only alternative form of visual information available. What would this study show if it had included musically literate children? or adults?
Learning how to write even twenty-six letters in cursive has become a considerable challenge for many grade schoolers of the ‘keyboard’ generation. As for anticipating their ‘productivity’ later on, it all depends on how the learning process of comprehending textual (written), visual, and auditory stimuli becomes encoded and internalized. That is where
emulating the Chinese approach to learning may find its relevance.