作者：安格斯·伍德
汉语普遍比较先进，有以下四个原因：
(1)更容易表达。信息时代，随着时间的推移，新的概念不断涌现。英语创造新词来表达这些概念，但这些新词大多数只是音节的集合，无法通过将它们与现有概念联系起来猜测它们的含义。结果，词汇量变得如此庞大且互不相关，不仅某个领域的新手需要花费太多时间来学习词汇，而且同一领域的专家也需要不断记住更新的词汇，而这些词汇则需要不断地记忆。时间可以用来专注于这些领域的知识。而且，这也导致不同领域的专家，无论关系多么密切，由于彼此的词汇难以管理，而很难相互交流。至于中文，这是完全不同的情况，高中毕业后，语言不再是问题，专家不需要记住词汇表，不同领域的专家可以轻松理解彼此的词汇。原因在于中文使用两个或多个字符来表达新概念，每个字符都有自己的含义，可以将新概念与现有概念联系起来，使用户很容易猜测可能的含义。与字母语言相比，这是一个巨大的优势，并且随着时间的推移，优势将变得越来越明显。用26个字母，你可以有数百万个英语单词来表达世界，但字母是没有意义的，每个单词都需要单独记住。对人类的生命来说，这是多么难以承受的负担？所以7000个汉字，都有自己的读音和意义，你能做什么来表达这个世界？它们是无限的中文单词组合，并且很容易猜出它们的含义。人类探索世界、创造新世界是多么美好的世界？
(2) 更易于阅读。随着信息的日益堆积，人们很难跟上理解相关文本信息的步伐，尤其是当每个单词都是音节的集合时，它比暗示更多的图形字符更慢。对于中文这样的二维语言来说，普通人可以看一页文章几眼就明白大意，但是对于英语这样的一维语言来说，就更难了——单词连在一起就像丑陋的蠕虫在寻呼机周围爬行一样。而且，对于一个受过大学教育的人来说，经常能在看报纸时遇到生词，这对于受过高中教育的中国人来说是一件很难得的事情。英语世界的教授需要不断地记住词汇，但中国人高中毕业后不会这样做。
(3) 更容易说、听、想。我们用发音来说话、听和思考，效率依赖于简单和丰富。每个汉字都是一个音节和一个意思的结合，而英语则用几个音节来表达一个意思，这使得中国人的思维速度很快。例如，如果你在心里数数或计算，中文就更容易、更快，因为在中文中，简单的数字只是一个音节。而且汉语的音韵比较丰富，音节较多，每个音节可以有四个声调。几乎在所有情况下，汉语在表达相同含义时都更节省文本长度和发音时间，这意味着说、听和思考更有效率。
（4）更容易学习。人们可能会说，汉语很难学。也许这适合那些曾经使用字母语言的人。事实上，许多中国孩子在一岁左右就能说中文，许多六岁左右甚至更大的孩子就能记住数千个汉字。对于词汇来说，如果你掌握了5000个字符，那么你就可以轻松驾驭数百万个单词——瓶颈是知识而不是语言。汉字图案富有规律，其本意是日常生活中的具体物品，配合物品的图片，很容易让孩子记忆。顺便说一句，3500个字可以成为一个有文化的人，5000个字可以成为一个受过教育的人，7000个字足以让一个教授进行高级研究。对于语法来说，
Is Chinese more advanced than English?
Chinese is generally more advanced for four reasons as bellow:
(1) Easier to express. In information times, new concepts are emerged in greater and greater numbers as time goes on. English creates new words to express these concepts, but most of these new words are just a collection of syllables, which cannot guess their meanings by relating them to existing concepts. As a consequence, the scale of vocabulary are becoming so enormous and unrelated that not only new hands in a field need to take too much time on learning its vocabulary but also experts in the same tiny field need to keep memorizing the updated vocabulary, while these time can be used in focusing on knowledge of these fields. Moreover, it causes that experts in different fields, however closely they are related, can hardly communicate with each other for the sake difficulty in governing each other’s vocabulary. As to Chinese, it is totally different scenario, after high school, language is not a problems anymore, experts don’t need to memorize lists of vocabulary and experts in different fields can easily understand each other’s vocabularies. The reason lies in that Chinese uses two or several characters to express new concepts, each character has its own meaning which can relate new concepts to existing one and makes users easy to guess the possible meaning. This is a huge advantage compared with alphabetic language and the advantage will become more and more obvious as time goes on. With 26 letters, you can have millions of English words to express the world, but letters are meaningless, each word needs to be remembered separately. What an unbearable burden for human life? So with 7000 characters, which have their own pronunciation and meaning, what you can do in expressing this world? Their are unlimited combination of Chinese words and the meanings of them can easily guess. What a wonderful world for human to explore the world and create a new world?
(2) Easier to read. As information are increasingly piled up, one can hardly keep on the step to understand related text information, especially when every word is a collection of syllables, it is more slow to get the point than graphic characters which give more hints. For Chinese, which is two-dimensional language, one common man can take several glances to a page of article and understand the main ideas, but for English, which a one-dimensional language, it is more difficult — the words are joined up as ugly worms crawling all around the pagers. Moreover, for one person with college education can often meet new words in reading newspaper, which is a rare thing for Chinese which high-school education. A professor in English world needs to keep memorize vocabularies, but Chinese don’t do such a thing after graduation from high school.
(3) Easier to speak, hear and think. We use pronunciation to speak, hear and think, the efficiency relies on the simplicity and richness. Every Chinese character is a union of a syllable and a meaning and for English, several syllables are used to express a meaning, which makes Chinese fast in thinking. For instance, if you do counting or calculation in mind, Chinese is much easier and faster, for in Chinese, easy of the numbers are just one syllable. Moreover, Chinese are more rich in sound, they use more syllables and each syllable can have four tones. Almost in every cases, Chinese is more economical in text length and pronunciation time to express the same meaning, which means more efficient in speaking, hearing and thinking.
（4）It is easier to learn. People may say, but Chinese is difficult to learn. Maybe it is for people who used to use alphabetic language. In fact, many Chinese children can speak Chinese at the age of around 1 and many with an age around 6 or older can memorize thousands of characters. For vocabulary, if you knon 5000 characters, it will be easy for you to govern millions of words – the bottleneck is knowledge not language. Characters are full of regular patterns and their original meanings are specific items in daily life, which makes it easy for children to memorize along with the pictures of the items. By the way, 3500 characters can make a literate person, 5000 can make an educated one, and 7000 are much enough for an professor to do advanced researches. For grammar, there is no grammar at least in the meaning of the western languages – there is no Tense, sex, number, lattice, deformation, never to say the combination of them.