@nicemicro Fair point on the particles. I was too narrow there.

On spaces, Chinese and Japanese did not end up without them out of stubbornness. They developed ways of reading that do not depend on spaces the way Latin-script languages often do. Most of the research people cite on spacing and reading speed comes from alphabetic languages, so it does not automatically apply to CJK. Treating that as “stubbornness” just assumes Latin-script conventions are the norm.

The hashtag friction is real regardless.

@hongminhee I remember someone citing studies specifically for Chinese (I think it was on a YouTube channel called Julesey, but I'm not sure exactly), and admittedly didn't check her sources.

And it isn't only Latin scripts that use spaces, I mean, Korean does, Cyrillic does, just like modern Arabic.

But you are right, not having spaces isn't what makes it hard for me to read Chinese, it is the existence of 100s of characters :)