Think of all the memorization you'd have to do to be literate. Like learning Japanese was going just swell until I got to the point where I realized I'd need to learn about a thousand kanji, and then there's kanji combinations to form words on top of that with obscure links that you'd have to really know the culture to understand.

But it is a very efficient language for the amount of information per character, so all that memorization might be worth it. If you ever watch any anime, you can see this when they use subtitles to translate stuff written down. There's often not enough space to show it all or time to read it because it's set up for japanese not english.