There are over 3500 basic Chinese characters. Characters are rarely words, they are individual syllables that also have meaning, as well as a sound.
There are some single character words, but most words are more than one syllable.
Just doing the maths, I get more than 2000 words. My daughters Chinese school dictionary has more more than 500 pages with more than 4 entries per page. Go figure.
I just found this suggest 370k modern words.
"The largest corpus of modern Chinese words is as listed in the Chinese Hanyucidian (汉语辞典), with 370,000 words derived from 23,000 characters, encompassing loanwords, zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. "
I don't think you guys are getting me. While there might be thousands upon thousands of "words" with different meanings in Chinese, the vast majority of these are homonyms. There are only 2,000 unique syllables. All of the 370,000 "words" that you have described, Dazzer, are some combination of these 2,000 basic syllables, of which 400 are unique and accounting for the 5 possible tones that makes 2000. Given that according to Chinese grammar, no differences are made according to time, gender and there are no articles (such as "a" or "the"), this naturally also means that you get fewer possible words.
The vast number of homonyms makes Chinese a super difficult language to learn in my opinion. If Chinese had more distinct words it'd make learning the language easier, not more difficult (at least for me), but well, it is what it is.
Still don't believe me? Consider the word "zhong" high tone. It can have literally dozens of meanings and the characters used will be different (although in my example they both use the same radical). Consider 中 and 钟. Both are pronounced exactly the same, but the first one means middle and the second one means time or o'clock as in "ji dian zhong?" (what time is it) or "si dian zhong" (4 O'clock). There are at least 50 meanings for the word "shi" falling tone, plus hundreds more for "shi" with the other tone markers. Yes this would mean that there are possibly 500 words with distinct meanings for the syllable "shi", but they all sound almost the same (and 50 of them sound EXACTLY the same) since "shi" is a homonym.
English and other languages also use homonyms but there are far, far fewer homonyms in English than in Chinese. I'm not going to go into any details about the large number of polysyllabic homonyms in Chinese, but naturally, they are just as numerous.
@tigertiger and @dazzer, I think you guys jumped the gun when you saw me using the word "words" to describe "syllables". Clearly there are more than 2,000 words in Chinese, but there are only 2,000 unique syllables. BIG DIFFERENCE, but I used the word "words" instead of syllable but trying to infer the same meaning. From the context and my other posts you would have recognized what I mean though.
Chinese makes more complex words from a combination of these individual 2,000 syllables. That's a primary reason why foreign loanwords can generally not be successfully transcribed into Chinese - there are too few syllables available. It's also difficult to directly compare a language like Chinese with it's character based writing system to one that uses an alphabet like English. Having said that though, English has by far the most extensive vocabulary of any language because it continues to borrow heavily from other languages. Chinese is different. You can create new words too, but these new "words" only arise from a combination of existing syllables. Consider for example, the word "India". India is India in virtually every language. However, not in Chinese, because there are no syllables corresponding to "In-Dee-ya" or "In-dia" or "In-dya" depending on how you want to spell out the individual syllables. Yes, the syllable "ya" exists in Chinese, but in the end, it becomes "Yin-du", the same word used to describe the Hindu religion.
If you are not talking about words do you mean syllables and the components of syllables?
There are only about 44 phonemes (vowel or consonant sounds) in the English language. With only very limited ways of expressing each on in spelling.
These are effectively our syllables or parts thereof. With only 26 characters to make phonemes with, and combinations of only 44 phonemes, some phonemes may have more than one spelling (rarely more than 3). I still don't understand the point yuanyangren made.
@dazzer, you obviously aren't a linguist and I don't understand what you are trying to say - I think I was being very clear though. Then again, I'm not a linguist either (I'm an engineer with a passion for languages though!) I am just pointing out what every Chinese language student starts to realize: the number of different sounds in Chinese is very limited. A syllable is a sound. I apologize for using the word "words" to describe what is actually a syllable in an earlier post.
Chinese has 2000 syllables with which to create every possible word. Many words consist of single syllables, others are composed of two syllables; a few words have 3 or more syllables but in general not many. Whereas in English many complicated medical, engineering and scientific terms have been borrowed from other languages including Latin and German, in Chinese, you'll find that unfamiliar words are composed of familiar syllables (or sounds). The characters for these words could however be very complex or different to anything you've ever seen.
That's why it's so important to be able to read Chinese characters. I can't stress this enough. There aren't enough syllables in Chinese to be able to make sense to a learner that doesn't have any knowledge of the written language. It's also another reason why Chinese can never use a phonetic writing system: every word would look the same even after adding tone markers. There are too many homonyms.
Going back to the OPs original Q.
There is an interesting parallel in this article, about the Japanese losing the ability to WRITE 'kanji' due to emails.
www.telegraph.co.uk/[...]
It's hard to remember the characters for reading if you don't write them!
Imagine being unable to write your own language; would it save you time?
Disagree
It is easy to confuse 'dong' (East) and 'che' (vehicle) and write the wrong one down. But easy to see them in context of a word or sentence.
Another common mistake is to use the wrong 'che' charachter, the equivalent of a spelling mistake perhaps.
In English it is easier to read, than to write without spelling mistakes. In school we were always reading at a level ahead of our writing abililty. There is a very good reason for this. Words on their own have no meaning. Chinese charachters on their own have even less meaning, as they are only part of a word, which itself only takes meaning from its context.
