The Japanese people set their phones to Chinese and used it for a year, and they can never go back. This caused an immediate uproar on their forums.

The reason is simple to the point of being a bit ironic: in the Japanese system, many function names are written in katakana (loanword transliterations).
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For example, “ダウンロード” → “Download,” in the Japanese system, you might see a long string of katakana, and you have to first read it aloud in your mind, then associate it with the corresponding English word, and only then understand that it means “Download.” This is like a cumbersome decoding process inserted between “seeing” and “understanding.”
And what about the Chinese system? “バッテリーセーバー” → “Power Saving Mode,” “アクセスポイント” → “Personal Hotspot,” “清理缓存” — Chinese characters, with extremely high information density, directly convey meaning.
Your eyes see the characters, your brain almost simultaneously understands the meaning. No middleman earning the “decoding” price difference.
So that Japanese netizen’s sentiment is very genuine: reading Japanese settings feels like decoding a password, dense and exhausting; switching to Chinese, it’s clear at a glance, the interface is clean, and efficiency skyrockets.
Is this just a discussion about language superiority? Clearly, it’s a collision of two information presentation logics: one is convoluted phonetic transliteration, the other is straightforward semantic directness.
In the digital world that pursues efficiency, which is more user-friendly, the high and low are obvious.
Chinese characters have endured for thousands of years, and in the digital age, they have gained popularity for “high efficiency and intuitiveness.”
This may be an accident, but it also reminds us: the advantages we take for granted, believing they “should be like this,” sometimes require others’ perspectives to see more clearly.
Of course, beyond cultural pride, we must also be sober-minded. The superiority of a system is never just about the characters. But at least, Chinese, with its simplicity and efficiency, has completed a beautiful “user experience” reverse output. $ETH
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