For a person who grew up learning chinese and live in a chinese environment, they will not find it difficult. You are judging based on your on bias opinion as a Malaysian. In our country chinese is not popular in commercial usage. It is only popular among a small chinese community. If a person went to SRJK ( C ), they can be out of touch with chinese since they dont use it in the work place. If they dont keep in touch by reading chinese papers, they will eventually lose touch with the characters.

In contrast places like Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China chinese is the official language and it is used widely in commerce. These people are constantly in touch with the characters every day.

I have no comments on Korea as I do not know much about it. I think they have a writing system of their own. As for Japan they had no choice but to preserve the Kanji. Their katagana and hiragana were also borrowed from chinese phonetic alphabets system call "por for mor for" ( I am not sure about the spelling for it). The chinese had invented alphabets long ago. The reason they do not use it is because there are too many homophones.

I think chinese will be around for a long time. The reason people are learning it is because one third of the world population is there. It is a huge market. Since China open up everyone wants to tap this market and the increase popularity in learning the language followed. One decade ago people use to watch the American economy as a sign of bad days ahead. Now the americans are watching the chinese economy.

It is not easy to remove it without a proper replacement. There would also be a lot of resistance from people who will be force to learn a new system. It is like reinventing the wheel. Since there had been various attempt to phase it out that failed, it is here to stay for good. We should thank Shi Huang Ti for unifying chinese characters.

This is interesting. Can you elaborate further?

That is the reason attempts to use alphabets for chinese is so difficult. Chinese is the only language that has a mono syllable for a word. Since the tongue and the ear is only limited in this area, the language is full of homophones