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The Chinese Language(s)

Everything Everywhere Daily

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The Importance of a Logographic System

Chinese symbols generally represent one word, but multiple characters can't be put together to represent words as well. Average literate Chinese college graduate is estimated to know between 3,000 to 4,000 characters. Each character has to be memorized separately as there's no phonetic information in the character for how it should be pronounced. There are foreign words that are sometimes represented by putting together characters that replicate the syllables in a quasi-finite way.

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