Eastern written languages...

Wrong place to ask this question, but a system like the Chinese use where each is assigned a symbol was great WAY back when, but now it is basically stupid.  Look at how much more efficient English is.  I can type millions of different words using 26 keys on my computer. 

but it made them amazing at math

I guess, but still, English, Spanish, and french are all comparable to math.  Math uses 10 base symbols.  0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7, 8, 9.  It may be 10 numbers, but each one can be used to make ANY number in the world.  They can be added together, even words can be added together.  A good example would be do not, it is the same as don't.  The thing with math that makes it so much better is that it is universal.  A 9 in China looks just like a 9 in America.  I wish the world spoke English as a universal language, not because I know it already, but because SO many other countries use English.  I think I might be wrong, but I think English is the only language they use in stuff like engineering.  IMO having different languages is pretty stupid.  Imagine if Mexico spoke English instead of Spanish, they would have so many more successful jobs in America, if they were legal, and our government would not be wasting money on bi lingual programs, just imagine.  Communicating on a universal scale would be so much more simple. 

Japanese has two phonetic character sets, hiragana and katakana. It's not all kanji (the symbol characters).

esperanto...

I was about to say that. Kanji (and Chinese) is messed.

I believe Korean is also phonetic much like hiragana.
Thai also has a strange phonetic writing system.

I got into a big discussion with this chinese co-worker of mine, because he thought English was all fucked up because it has so many words, and after trying to tell him that it is derived from so many language groups and phonetics, he stated chinese was the best because it uses thousands of characters. Fuck that.