Language

Part of what makes Chinese unique is the characters; part of what makes it unique is the tones (though other languages have tones, none of the other major ones do); part of what makes it unique is the structure of the language.

It is important to understand that Chinese is monosyllabic, meaning each character - that is each unit of meaning - is one syllable. Among other things, being monosyllabic and character based severely limits the number of possible sounds. Why is that important? English has over 15,000 syllables (this number is iffy as there is no precise count); English words are from one (you; me; dog) to ten (antidisestablishmentarianism) syllables long. Some Chinese words are one syllable (i.e. one character), most are two, some are three and there is a decent number of four character words (and so strictly speaking Chinese is not truly monosyllabic: it is at the individual character/meaning level, but not at the word level). So the use of an alphabet allows for much greater flexibility and variety than the use of characters.

It is also potentially much easier to be illiterate in Chinese than in an alphabetic language. In order to read English, you must learn 26 letters, and then practice recognizing the combinations in words. To read in Chinese you must learn thousands of characters.

Language

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