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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:29PM
The Chinese Communist Party has a lot to answer for. A lot. But character simplification has worked to boost literacy levels. Can the average Chinese peasant read the original court documents in the Tang Dynasty? No, but they can read the newspaper, and that's a lot more than the peasants during the Tang Dynasty could have said. Likewise opium addiction and foot-binding have been stamped out by the CCP. Those are both very good things. The first was of course encouraged by the British to suck all the silver out of China, the second was an awful misogynist practice that had become "tradition." I once saw an elderly, foot-bound woman trying to climb the path on Taishan, the holiest mountain in Daoism, and it broke my heart.
Jiantizi (simplified characters) give hundreds of millions of Chinese access to knowledge that would have remained shut off to them. It's a good thing.
Washington DC delenda est.