One thing to keep in mind is how much the Education Establishment enjoys having smart citizens give them cover. Whoops, there goes another million illiterates.
Only the most scholarly Chinese can memorize even 20,000 of their symbols. Apparently a more normal number is well below 10,000. But English has a truly vast vocabulary. College kids need 100,000++ words. No human can memorize such a number. Furthermore, English words come lower case, UPPER CASE, script, etc.
For anyone who is curious what this avalanche of confusing graphic designs does to the brain, please Google “How Dolch Words Cause Illiteracy and Dyslexia,” a graphical video on YouTube. About 7 minutes but it tells the story well. (I have about ten videos about reading on YouTube.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNDFTBkPBQ
Actually, most literate chinese know around 20,000 words, and many of those are made up of combinations of ideograms, and the combinations have to be memorized separately, since they combine ideograms that have different meanings when not combined. The Chinese language has around 60,000 separate characters, and the really scholarly know ~45,000. Yes, English may have over 100,000 words, but if you’re going to drag in capitalization and font, then that’s another issue altogether. Chinese words, for example, also have numerous written forms analogous to machine print, hand print, cursive, and even classical calligraphy (so-called “grass script”), as well as simplified and traditional versions in print form. Further, many of those English words 100,000 are technical terms or compounded from simpler terms, which can be inferred from their root words, or from context. Phonics only conveys sound. You still have to memorize the meaning. That having been said, the original argument stands that ideogram-based languages require far more memorization than alphabet-based languages, and yet that hasn’t impaired the learning of cultures that use those languages.