Over the years many scholars and politicians have suggested that the Latin alphabet be substituted for the characters, but such a reform has never been tried. There are several reasons.
First of all, the characters are well suited to their purpose. The Chinese language is poor in sounds, and if the Latin alphabet were used, many words would be spelled the same way, making texts difficult to interpret.
Second, the characters are an important unifying factor in a country with many different and mutually incomprehensible spoken dialects. People speak differently but write the same.
Third, Chinese characters are surprisingly practical to use in our modern world. They take a lot of time to learn, but once mastered, they have many advantages. The cursive script is a natural shorthand, which can be used to take notes at a baffling speed. The fax machine circumvents the earlier problems with telexes and telegrams, and Chinese word-processing programs now make it possible to type Chinese more quickly than English. Some people believe that Chinese can be read faster than a language using phonetic script.