> Sure, most folks would frown and claim that Kanji or Arabic script looks like noise and must be difficult. Yet some people read it just as easy as we read roman scripts
This is folding several claims into each other, and they're not all true.
I would tend to associate "looks like noise" with writing where the units are not separated from each other. Arabic has this feature and this makes it appear more forbidding to the untrained.
Devanagari has it too: भारत गणराज्य
Ge'ez script doesn't: የኢትዮጵያ ፌዴራላዊ ዴሞክራሲያዊ ሪፐብሊክ
English does, if you choose to write in cursive.
By this standard that I just made up, kanji are clearly pretty far toward the "organized" end of the spectrum. An untrained person looking at them is going to be able to tell you what the main principles of the script are. And while I suspect that people complaining that a script "looks like noise" are mostly just saying that they can't read it, I also think that if people were forced to rank scripts based on how confusing they look, Arabic would be rated a lot more confusing than kanji.
(For a parallel to the above examples: 大日本帝國; الْخِلَافَة الْعَبَّاسِيَّة.)
This belies reality; in fact, reading kanji is so much more difficult that your claim that some people can do it as easily as we read Roman scripts is not defensible. (Whereas it's fine for Arabic.) The problem isn't in the appearance of the elements, it is that there are too many of them. This means that (a) learning to read kanji is a multi-year process; and (b) even those who are considered "fully educated" nevertheless need help in doing things like reading museum plaques or technical documents that use words which modern people are not expected to encounter in day-to-day life. If all you have is "full" training in the writing system, these words cannot be read at all, so there is a system of phonetic annotation for just this purpose. (For Japanese kanji, ruby; for Taiwan, zhuyin; for mainland China, pinyin.)
Kanji in specific has an additional problem that Chinese characters do not have, which is that the Japanese interpreted it as being primarily a logographic script rather than a phonetic script. To predict how a kanji is supposed to be pronounced, you need to see a particular use in a particular sentence and know the Japanese language. This is not true of Chinese characters - but it's not so much of a problem for your claim that "some people find this just as easy as we find reading Roman characters"; native speakers of Japanese don't have a problem with knowing Japanese. It does mean that it's hard to predict how personal names are supposed to be pronounced.
Someone seeing an unfamiliar kanji-based term in a Japanese technical document would often have little trouble reading it phonetically.
Furigana helps if one or more of the kanji used is rare (outside of the jōyō kanji), or when the word follows some common variation (guessing which is possible, but wastes the reader's time) or when the kanji spelling is arbitrarily assigned ("ateji"; impossible to guess).
E.g. suppose the reader sees 帰納. It is very likely they can read it correctly as kinō. The problem is not knowing what it means, that it refers to (mathematical) induction, or inductive reasoning. The dictionary lookup is trivial, though.
Basically, someone fluent in Japanese can read unfamiliar words like that most of the time. They will know a ton of words in which 帰 is ki and 納 is nō. In situations like that, it's not much different from someone encountering an unfamiliar word in English or Spanish text.
Someone literate in English would also need a dictionary just as much to read academic, esoteric, or old words from a museum. They might be able to guess the meaning based on word roots and context, but I assume someone literate with kanji could do the same based on radicals and context.
I think their claim is still defensible, and I think to make a fair argument you'd have to reduce the scope of kanji down to something the size of APL's vocabulary in any counterclaim.
> Someone literate in English would also need a dictionary just as much to read academic, esoteric, or old words from a museum.
This is plainly untrue; if you go to a museum and they're displaying an astrolabe, you can read the word "astrolabe" despite the fact that you've never learned it. In Japanese and Chinese, this is not true,† and the text describing the exhibit must separately inform you of how the word is pronounced.
Similarly, if you look over your Chinese medical record, it will be full of unfamiliar characters that you need to look up by shape if you want to read them. An English speaker may not know what a biopsy is, but they won't have trouble reading the word.
† It might be true; I have not looked into "astrolabe" specifically. But for various premodern devices, it is not true.
This is folding several claims into each other, and they're not all true.
I would tend to associate "looks like noise" with writing where the units are not separated from each other. Arabic has this feature and this makes it appear more forbidding to the untrained.
Devanagari has it too: भारत गणराज्य
Ge'ez script doesn't: የኢትዮጵያ ፌዴራላዊ ዴሞክራሲያዊ ሪፐብሊክ
English does, if you choose to write in cursive.
By this standard that I just made up, kanji are clearly pretty far toward the "organized" end of the spectrum. An untrained person looking at them is going to be able to tell you what the main principles of the script are. And while I suspect that people complaining that a script "looks like noise" are mostly just saying that they can't read it, I also think that if people were forced to rank scripts based on how confusing they look, Arabic would be rated a lot more confusing than kanji.
(For a parallel to the above examples: 大日本帝國; الْخِلَافَة الْعَبَّاسِيَّة.)
This belies reality; in fact, reading kanji is so much more difficult that your claim that some people can do it as easily as we read Roman scripts is not defensible. (Whereas it's fine for Arabic.) The problem isn't in the appearance of the elements, it is that there are too many of them. This means that (a) learning to read kanji is a multi-year process; and (b) even those who are considered "fully educated" nevertheless need help in doing things like reading museum plaques or technical documents that use words which modern people are not expected to encounter in day-to-day life. If all you have is "full" training in the writing system, these words cannot be read at all, so there is a system of phonetic annotation for just this purpose. (For Japanese kanji, ruby; for Taiwan, zhuyin; for mainland China, pinyin.)
Kanji in specific has an additional problem that Chinese characters do not have, which is that the Japanese interpreted it as being primarily a logographic script rather than a phonetic script. To predict how a kanji is supposed to be pronounced, you need to see a particular use in a particular sentence and know the Japanese language. This is not true of Chinese characters - but it's not so much of a problem for your claim that "some people find this just as easy as we find reading Roman characters"; native speakers of Japanese don't have a problem with knowing Japanese. It does mean that it's hard to predict how personal names are supposed to be pronounced.