some rants

Chinese characters come in various levels of complexity. Simple ones like 人 or 中, medium ones like 安 or 慢, and really complex ones like 邊 or 機. The complex ones contain a lot of strokes, are hard to read and even harder to write, but they are still pronounced as one single syllable and since there are not many pronunciations available, there are lots of other characters which sound the same. The information value of the character is thus the same. Only very few characters (for words such as "I", "pig", "meat" and grammatical particles) are used by themselves. Most Chinese words consist of several characters (the great majority actually of two) and the characters themselves only have a use inside all of the words (or idioms, if you prefer that) in which they occur.
Now the big stupid trouble is that even the very complex characters almost always need some other characters around them when properly used. All that work to write a complex character and then it does not have extra value. That's why I am strongly in favour of the simplified characters. They carry the same meaning, transfer the same information with much less effort. People in Taiwan say that the complex (or traditional, or "real") characters are more beautiful. But to me embellishment is not beauty. In this case, Antoine de St. Exupéry's observation fully applies: Perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to remove. ("La perfection n'est pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsque qu'il n'y a plus rien à enlever.")

Actually, I think that it would be best for the Chinese to not use the characters at all for daily writing (like business, shopping lists, text chat, newspapers) and instead switch to a sound-based writing system like the Koreans did when they gave up Chinese characters and like the Vietnamese did, too. But well, I not here to change to world, but to learn those characters. And there I go...