Isn't the syllabary writing system (i.e., Chinese, Japanese) an inferior writing system?

I don’t know about Chinese, but I think Japanese is superior.

Japanese like German (Ancient Greek/Turkish/Korean/Swahili) is agglutinative so you can put words together to make longer words. This means that it is much easier to learn the lexicon because you can just learn the building blocks and then figure out the meaning of more complex words from the blocks. In English a knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin helps but to a much larger extent each word is unique so you have spend your whole life, or into your 40s, expanding your vocabulary. Japanese school children can learn 2000 characters and read almost everything. Japanese can be *learnt* (with hard graft admittedly), English much be *acquired* over a much longer period of time.

The cool thing about Japanese that, in addition to being agglutinative, there are (shorter) “on” and (longer) “kun” readings of the characters, where the former is used for when the character is used in a compound and the latter for when the character is used on its own.

This means that Japanese can agglutinate its characters to create words which are still quite short to write on the page, and read out loud, but contain the complex meaning in the characters, whereas words in German, ancient Greek, and indeed English, contain their meaning solely in the phonemes so the agglutinated words become rather a mouthful.

antidisestablishmentarianism ( made of anti dis establish ment arian ism) is a mouthful.

Japanese with its characters AND phonemes is both agglutinative and NOT so much of a mouthful.

A Japanese proponent of Japanese used the example of “shadowless operating theatre lamp” or the short 無影灯 in Japanese, and a longish word of the form shadowlesslamp (I have forgotten the word) in German.