Why are Chinese characters still used?

I mean, they may be beautiful, but they're horribly obsolete, cumbersome and impractical. Thousands of little drawings to memorize just to read a simple article in an unsophisticated news daily.
Using an obsolete pictographic writing system certainly doesn't help in spreading literacy (especially in case of foreigners trying to learn the language).
Why does China still cling so stubbornly on to them?
Some might say that disposing them off would 'destroy Chinese language and culture' but wouldn't many more people learn the Chinese (or Japanese) language if it had a more practical orthography?
Japanese intrigues me even more. They use two syllaberies in conjunction with Chinese characters- why not just use the syllaberies instead?
It's not like they're a good shorthand or anything-
Writing 'yuuki'-courage takes 15 strokes in characters (勇気) and at most 7 or 8 strokes in kana (syllaberies), likewise 'ai'-love 13 strokes in characters (愛) and 5 strokes in kana, 'ryouri'- cuisine- characters 21 strokes (料理), kana 8 strokes.
Usage of Chinese characters leads to horrible complexities in the Japanese writing system, with many different pronunciations for the same character depending on context; usually two or three, but often much higher than that. For example, the character '日' which means 'sun' or 'day' can be pronounced 'ni', 'hi', 'bi', 'jitsu', 'tachi', or 'ka', not to mention pronunciations unique to certain words; like '昨日'-kinou-'yesterday' and '明日'-ashita- 'tomorrow'.
There are even words in which the same character occurs more than once with different pronunciations like '日曜日'-nichiyoubi- 'Sunday' in which the character for day/sun occurs twice with a different pronunciation each time- 'nichi' and 'bi'.
Wouldn't it save anyone learning the Japanese or Chinese language, including the Japanese and Chinese themselves, a lot of headache if they just use an alphabetic or syllabic system instead?

To say that an alphabet (e.g. pinyin) is more efficient and easy to learn than ideograms (e.g. hanzi) is not a cultural judgment; it is an objective fact. How much value to place on efficiency vs. tradition is of course a subjective, cultural matter. But we can still compare writing systems objectively on various criteria without being advocates.
Ideograms are wildly inefficient (in fact, a few subregularities aside, they're the most inefficient system possible for representing words), and one negative impact of that inefficiency is making it harder to be highly literate. Unfortunately it's hard to get reliable figures on literacy in China. The official government figure is about 90%, but (a) that is for a fairly low number of characters (1,500?) and (b) it is almost certainly highly inflated (starting at the level of local over-reporting).
I found that Victor Mair, a professor of Asian Studies at UPenn, writes on Language Log that he would be "very surprised" if 10-15% of the Chinese population can write 3,000 characters (although if we talk about recognition rather than writing, he estimates 20-25%). Move the cutoff up to 7,000 characters and he writes: "I doubt whether even a hundredth of one percent of the Chinese population can write 7,000 characters; probably no more than 2-3% could recognize that many."
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004457.html
For comparison, if you rank all English words (lemmas) by frequency, here are the slots from 3000-3005 in one ranking: virus, shrink, influence, freezing, concert. Even beyond the most common 3000 words, the words are still extremely familiar, and it would seem strange to say that someone was literate in English who couldn't read words like those.

It will never change regardless. Even English speakers will never give up their silly little 'ough's and the like, and you expect Chinese to give up their hieroglyphs which are a thousand times richer than English spelling quirks. So, while I agree that they are very impractical, it's basically more likely China will adopt English as official language rather than get rid of the characters.

The socialist world republic should speak Esperanto! Esperanto Ĉirkaŭ la Mondo

We regret that the world abounds in dumbos like you!

Vietnamese and Koreans did it right when they abolished useless Chinese pictograms.

haha, I am chinese, I spend 12years to learn chinese characters , chinese literature,chinese poetry, Tang and Song. But I still don't understand Tang and Song poetry. In china, most students,most adults don't undersand ancient poetry and writing. But after 12years of learning,you can read all books，articles and newspapers which written in simplified characters.
I think if you learn characters for three years or less ,you can read all articles, it's easy,most of them are commonly used characters.
why I spend 12years? 6 years primary, 3 years junior high school, 3 years Senior high school.
What difficulty is idioms and phrase,because every idiom is from ancient stories，articles and poems.
Courage is 勇气 in chinese character，love is 爱. Japan‘s chinese character 勇気 and 愛, which are slightly different from china.

They may be hard to learn and hard to type by machine, but how inefficient are Chinese characters when written by hand? A whole word can be written in just one or two characters.

<<In china, most students,most adults don't undersand ancient poetry and writing.>>

How many E1Lers can read Beowulf, or read the Canterbury Tales easily? These aren't really ancient, either. Some folks even complain about reading the King James bible or Shakespeare.

Seriously, I wish the character haters would just SHUT UP. It's not that hard (unless you're retarded) and it's worked just fine for thousands of years. Plus Chinese written in pinyin looks incredibly ugly, and there would be a lot of ambiguity.

Vietnamese and Korean look much better than Chinese and Japanese.
For Chinese and Japanese you need a magnifier to decyphre many ''drawings''

Vinho Branco Mon Mar 30, 2009 6:59 pm GMT
Vietnamese and Korean look much better than Chinese and Japanese.
For Chinese and Japanese you need a magnifier to decyphre many ''drawings''
===================
NIce one! ASs laughed off!
What about Hindi and Arabic?

china1,
<< haha, I am chinese, I spend 12 years to learn chinese characters, chinese literature, chinese poetry, Tang and Song. But I still don't understand Tang and Song poetry. >>

1. In the Middle Age (Great Tang Empire 618 AD - 907 AD and Great Song Empire 960 AD - 1279 AD) the peoples of imperial territories were speak many kinds of very different Spoken Languages, and the Literary Chinese was their only one Written Language.

2. The Spoken Mandarin was appear in the time of Great Yuan Empire (1279 AD - 1368 AD) and Written Mandarin was developed at 1920s.

3. The Literary Chinese (Wenyanwen; 文言文) and Written Mandarin (Baihuawen; 白话文 or Hanyu; 汉语) are two different Written Language.

In Mainland, the secondary schools teach students with the courses of Written Mandarin about 70%? or 80%? and the Literary Chinese less than 30%? or 20%?.

So, the folks of Mandarin Education in schools were difficult to understand the poetries of Tang and Song dynasties, unless the explanation by experts in Written Mandarin.

It's not that the Chinese should give it up, but I really think teachers of Chinese (especially in the West) need to remove it from the curriculum until you get to be more advanced. It's a huge turn off having to learn a new alphabet, much less a pictographic system.

I'd argue the same for Japanese, although being a phonetic script, it hardly presents the same complications as Chinese.

I'd rather read characters than lots of diacritical marks. Japanese uses four writing systems. Japanese could be written entirely in hiragana (phonetic script previously used by female writers hundreds of years ago, I believe), but there are so many words that sound alike and it's helpful to see the characters.

I'd argue the same for Japanese, although being a phonetic script, it hardly presents the same complications as Chinese.

what about English? I'm waiting for a spelling reform.