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How does the chinese or japanese language work?

Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 3:12 pm
by robertsimon
I'm confused... I've heard there are tens of thousands of characters in the Chinese language. I've heard that an educated person in Chinese needs to learn around 6000 characters? How is a person supposed to remember over 6000 letters and then use them in words. That sounds crazy! I'm a little confused on how the language is structured. In English there are 26 letters and different combinations make different words, but I've heard in Chinese one character can mean a whole word. Also how is Japanese structured? Is it the same as Chinese or is it different.