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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 quacking duck on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:41PM
You'd think that might be the case, but even in the UK, which is smaller than Japan, never mind China, there are a variety of accents and dialects from one end of the island to the other. And it's not even the same language, seeing as Wales has that town named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Friday December 18 2015, @06:38PM
I just want to point out that I marveled to discover that name.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 19 2015, @02:24AM
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch."
That sounds like a town made of Taz. Not "a bunch of Tasmanian devils." A few hundred clones of Taz, the Looney Tune. How the hell do you pronounce that? o_O
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...