If we wrote English like Chinese

Chinese is written with 汉字 (Chinese characters), which seem overcomplicated, but have much logic. The logic is so effective that Chinese is easier to read with 汉字 than with just phonetic pīnyīn, at least above the beginning level. How it works is normally only clear after significant study. Perhaps I can show it faster, by transferring the structure of 汉字 into English.

If we wrote English like Chinese, we might write a sentence as

I hepailed it on a manbed, in facunt of the mintatoesing four-footen palwipe lubox.

Which sentence, in traditional English, would be

I piled it on a couch, in front of the imposing four-metre white cube.

A few words here are basic enough to have forms of their own: "I", "it", "on", "a", "in", "of", "the". Likewise, a few 汉字 are atomic, like "上" and "一".

Other words are ideograms, like "manbed" (couch) or "footen" (metre). For those, combine two or more words based on meaning, sometimes to make a sort of picture, separate from pronunciation. Likewise, in 汉字, characters like "桌" or "折" juxtapose other, simpler characters. In those examples, "卓" (high) and "木" (wood) come together to mean "table", and "扌" (hand) and "斤" (axe) come together to mean "break off".

Most other complex words come from two simpler words, one that means something related (a semantic part), and one pronounced similarly (a phonetic part).

A few extra complexities of 汉字 show up in those examples.

Sometimes a component character itself has multiple parts. The "mintame" in "mintatoes" is made of "mind" and "tame", an ideogram for "frighten". The 辵 (wakfut) in 道 (dao) is made of 彳 (walk) and 止 (foot).

Usually, the semantic part is on the left, and the phonetic part is on the right. Sometimes a character is formed the other way around. "Lubox" is like this, tho examples are sparse in true 汉字.

The parts of a character are written smaller combined than they would be alone. You can see this in any complex 汉字, and I mimicked it in English by compressing component words: "heap" to "hep", "face" to "fac", and so on.

These patterns in the structure of 汉字 make them complex at first appearance and effective for practised use. When seeing a character for the first time — to learn a common one taken from a list, or to understand a rare one encountered in the wild — you can guess at what it means and how to pronounce it from the parts it shares with others. When the guess is right, you'll remember the character better. When the guess is wrong, you can shift how you understand parts of 汉字 to make better guesses later.