Comment by sbierwagen

Keeping up written proficiency in Chinese is a pretty big task, though. It's hard enough for people who live in China: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 Logographic languages are also a little more disconnected from their written form than spoken form than alphabetic languages, for obvious reasons. You can't sound out 皻, or work out its pronunciation from each radical. The spoken form of each symbol has to be memorized.