system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:Why are asian language scripts much more complex than european scripts?
gpt
different culture, different way of doing things. All cultures have their quirks. English for example is an odd language in that it's grammar rules are complex and have a lot of exceptions.

East Asian languages (Japanese, Vietmanese, Chinese, etc) all have roots in the Chinese script (Except Korea, they're weird). This stems from China at some point owning pretty much everything around them at various points in history. They were also the cultural dominator in the region for a very long time - Think ancient times US level of cultural dominance. Written Chinese was the universal language, the English of today, back then. Everyone knew how to read and write it, even if when they spoke different languages.

That said, written Chinese is pictographic. It's just how the cultures chose to write and that evolved. To those unfamiliar with it it's incredibly complex and makes no sense. To those that are familiar with it there's a system behind it. It's not as simple as an alphabet, but it has advantages.

Since they are pictures, the characters represent what they actually are. For example, the character for person looks like a torso and 2 legs. Fire and water are stylized fire and water. The character for door looks like a door. One of the symbols used in the characters for student looks like a person wearing a hat.

Built on this, more complex characters are usually made up of other characters. A word describing a type of person may contain a modified person character in it. Basically, the parts of the character conveys meaning about what the character is. As a result, you can often figure out what a character is based off of the parts of the character and the context of the sentence around it. There are a number of these common elements and they are used in Chinese dictionaries to look up the meaning of characters.