>Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix).
You can certainly write things out in kana. When I was more serious about studying Japanese, I knew less than 1000 kanji, but had a vocabulary several times that size, and would at times write out the word I meant in hiragana. And if we're counting autocorrect, your IME is going to take that hiragana and let you find the character.
>• Looking up words is harder, as there are no "letters" to sort by. Sorting can be done by stroke count, by radical (four corners or SKIP), or by phonetic spelling (in pinyin or hiragana). Modern technology has made this easier, and some phone apps (like Pleco) can even OCR hanzi. Still, it's far less convenient than phonetic languages.
Eh, I disagree here. It's harder if you're used to looking things up by the spelling, but once you're fast at looking things up by radical, it's not that difficult. My misguided attempts at slogging through 1Q84 while reading at a, at best, middle school level got me pretty fast at looking up kanji. Not any appreciable difference vs. looking things up in a regular dictionary.
You cannot write things out in Kana in Chinese. As such, GP's point against logographic writing systems stands, notwithstanding mixed writing systems such as Japanese.
Even without autocorrect, you can write a word in English such that most people would understand. Of course, in a logographic system you'd just write a homophone (which is what people actually do, write a simpler word pronounced the same).
As for looking up, it is in principle easier though. You only need to learn the order of about 26 things, not about 200, and can then run iterative binary search over it, and don't have to switch to stroke count. It is possible, of course.
Some upper and lower case letters have no clear resemblance, see Aa Rr Gg Nn, so one has to learn 52 symbols. Add other 52 symbols for script, if you have to. Then in the case of English learn how to pronounce or spell words, because in some cases there are no rules (why ocean and not oshean? Because of derivation from Greek, still...)
Anyway, any alphabet is better than Chinese characters.
You can certainly write things out in kana. When I was more serious about studying Japanese, I knew less than 1000 kanji, but had a vocabulary several times that size, and would at times write out the word I meant in hiragana. And if we're counting autocorrect, your IME is going to take that hiragana and let you find the character.
>• Looking up words is harder, as there are no "letters" to sort by. Sorting can be done by stroke count, by radical (four corners or SKIP), or by phonetic spelling (in pinyin or hiragana). Modern technology has made this easier, and some phone apps (like Pleco) can even OCR hanzi. Still, it's far less convenient than phonetic languages.
Eh, I disagree here. It's harder if you're used to looking things up by the spelling, but once you're fast at looking things up by radical, it's not that difficult. My misguided attempts at slogging through 1Q84 while reading at a, at best, middle school level got me pretty fast at looking up kanji. Not any appreciable difference vs. looking things up in a regular dictionary.