Writing systems

[regenbogen9]

Which writing system is usually the most complicated, uncommon, the hardest to learn? Which one is the best when you want to write more by writing fewer characters?

[Arayaz]

Which writing system is usually the most complicated, uncommon, the hardest to learn? Which one is the best when you want to write more by writing fewer characters?

Without question, a logography is probably what you're looking for. They're not the most uncommon ─ that'd be a syllabary, I think ─ but they have the greatest information density, the most glyphs one has to learn, and usually the least straightforward rules.

[Creyeditor]

What is the most common type of writing system actually? Abjad? Abiguda?

Edit: Okay, I counted stuff on Wikipedia and it seems abigudas are most frequent. True alphabets are also very common. Featural alphabets, abjads, and logographs are not common. (Semi-)syllabaries are kind of in between. Of course, just very rough educated guesses.

[Visions1]

I don't think it's so cut and dry. For example, 3000 years ago, what would have been more common?
And what is a different script? I think defining that would knock India's number down a drop, or increase Europe's.
Plus, what determines a language's speakers making a new script vs. borrowing another?

[Creyeditor]

As I said, very rough guesses. I only counted top level categories in the Wikipedia list of writing systems if that helps.

[WeepingElf]

And what is a different script? I think defining that would knock India's number down a drop, or increase Europe's.

Indeed, the various abugidas of India and Southeast Asia are all just surface variations of a single original abugida, Brahmi. The difference between India and Western Europe is one in degree rather than in kind: in India, each major language developed its own distinctive letter-forms to the point that the relationship is hardly recognizable to the non-specialist any more, so we count them as different scripts, while in Europe, the differences between the national styles (such as Fraktur in Germany) were less pronounced, and the Renaissance with its return to classical Latin letter shapes and the introduction of the printing press, led to a standardization of the letter-forms between the different countries, even more so later technologies such as the typewriter, the telegraph and the computer, and we count all that as a single Latin script, even though the differences in the phonetic values of the letters are substantial enough (e.g. z is /ts/ in German and /z/ in most other languages, or c is /k/ in Irish but /ts/ in Polish). It is a question of how many sets of letters you need to typeset all those languages, and hardly anything else.

[Visions1]

Still, you probably could combine a couple Indic scripts. A bit, not a lot.