Why is learning 20 inscrutable icons harder?

1. cannot look up an icon in a dictionary

2. cannot google an icon

3. icons are not standardized - companies copyright their icons and sue anyone else who uses them

4. icons do not have a sort order

5. cannot type an icon into a text editor /word processor

6. fonts don't support icons

It's hard to reason and talk about something until you name it. With named keywords, you already have a name for it, even if you say it different than the English pronunciation.

Unless the script is so foreign to you (ex. Latin vs Arabic) that the keywords look like inscrutable symbols anyway.

For a perfect example, try learning APL without having any background or reference names for its symbols: http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_APL_symbols.html

Because they are tiny and can be unreadable at perfectly normal font sizes.

You're wording is interesting and has me thinking. Why think of these words individually, with their individual characters, as a burden of the English lexicon, and instead think of the words as an image in their entirety. So thats it's almost programming by picture.

Could a localization be implemented in a header file with #defines to turn the localized keyword to the real one?