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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet [medium.com].
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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