Alphanumeric characters? Sheer luxury! We had to get up each day before we went to sleep, clean out the bit bucket on top of the rubbish tip we lived in, with our tongues, and then we had to flip switches to enter our movements in binary, and pay mill owner for the privilege, and when we got home our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance on our graves, singing Halleluia!
But you try telling the young people that. They won't believe you!
With Mandarin it felt almost like I was learning two separate languages at the same time, spoken Mandarin and written Mandarin.
That's because you are: you got the problem in one. Not only do you have to learn what the base logogram means, but also how it sounds. You might be able to get away with mapping logogram-to-meaning (in your native language) first, then mapping meaning-to-sounds later, a la Heisig's Remembering the Kanji.
I hope the (soon to become) MeeGo line will be relevant.
Readers should not confuse this with, in order of increasing danger, the LG Migo, which "is perfect for your kid's first phone," the Bhutanese Migo, which is "known by the Nepalese and Tibetans as the Yeti, and to the Chinese and Soviets as the Alma," or the Lovecraft Mi-Go, which "are large, pinkish, fungoid, crustacean-like entities the size of a man with a 'convoluted ellipsoid' composed of pyramided, fleshy rings and covered in antennae where a head would normally be."
Because Egyptian hieroglyphics actually meant something to the Egyptian people.
I know, right? Just the other day I was telling my Egyptologist friend: "Eagle snake foot pharoah-on-a-throne-holding-out-his-hand, wheat!", and he laughed and said, "Eye cat eagle ibis... eye-of-Ra!" It was a riot!
I'm not a linguist, as I'm probably about to demonstrate, but the development of written language went (very) roughly like: pictograms -> consonants -> vowels -> punctuation
ATLEASTWERENOTGOINGBACKTOTHAT
PHASEOFWRITINGWHENEVERYTHINGWAS
INMAJUSCULEANDTHEREWASNOSPACING
BETWEENWORDS
ANDWHENREADINGACTUALLYMEANT
OUTLOUDEVENIFYOUWEREALONE
Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie