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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:09AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:03PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:03PM (#277760)

    150 symbols is enough is vastly underestimating the systems complexity

    A rule could be, "Plain is spelled like Plan but with an I after the a". That's to say, many times the rules are actually worse then memorizing unless you already speak the language fluently so that you're mapping sounds to symbols as opposed to learning sounds and symbols at the same time.

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