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from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.
It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!
For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:25AM
Your fear is more than justified. And English as 26 letters, and more like 256, at least in ASCII. Do try to keep up, or I will submit your actual identity to the Chinese Society of The Rectification of Names. Seriously.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:40PM
<overanalyze>
Actually, ASCII has 127. It's 7 bits, not 8. And 33 of those are unprintable control codes, so we're down to 94.
Depending on whether you consider uppercase and lowercase different letters, that would bring us down to 68. If we reasonably don't consider space or underscore letters, 66.
Then there's tilde and grave accent, which I've never seen used in written English, so 64.
</overanalyze>
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"