Ideographic vs phonographic

We use Kanji a lot unwittingly without much attention or appreciation. But there are amazingly few peoples in the world who use ideographic characters (表意文字) that represent meaning instead of sound. Even picture-like characters of hieroglyph in Ancient Egypt stand for sound. So Kanji is quite special.
Yesterday, I talked with a guy from Seattle, who is learning Japanese hard. Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn because you can't read until you learn 50 Hiragana and 50 katakana first. But it is not enough. If you want to learn the language from everyday things like newspaper or advertisement in a train, you need to read Kanji. (Compare it with 26 letters when we learn English.)
He mastered Hiragana and Katakana perfectly. But the problem is Kanji. He said that complex Kanji is easier to remember than simpler ones. For instance, 白 is only one stroke away from 日. So he always get confused. For him 薔薇 is rather easier to remember.
This may be like my experience of learning English words. Big words such as "enthusiastic" or "idiosyncrasy" were easier than combinations of simple words, that is phrasal words like "give in" or "take to". I still confuse wary with weary.

Even more interesting was that he had difficulty in Japanese reading（訓読み）. For him, Chinese reading(音読み）is much easier.
We thought about it a short while and I came up with an idea. Kanji is ideographic. Since alphabets are just phonographic (representing sound), people used to Indo-European languages may find it difficult to read directly a meaning from a letter, not by way of sound. He agreed.
Without knowing it particularly, we have been receiving full benefits from kanji. Since it is processed as a picture in our brain (right hand side of the brain), it is extremely quick to be understood. In fact, when we try to read fast, we begin to pick up only Kanjis (skipping hiragana part) and we can grasp a whole thing. So we have only to "look at" sentences rather than "read" them when we are reading.
Learning Japanese may be hard. But once learned, it may be the most effective and powerful language in the world.
With just a glance at "日本語＊世界一＊効率的＊言語" we can understand all within a matter of a moment.