Modern Chinese script isn't purely logographic, most of the characters are radical-phonetic. Like the word 媽 (mā) means mother, it combines the radical (left part of the character) for woman 女 with the sound of the word for horse 馬 (ma) indicating that the word sounds the same. A lot of characters show up a lot purely as their phonetic sound, which is why you can sometimes guess how a character is pronounced even if you've never seen it before with that radical. And I think the characters used for phonetics repeat a lot, and they often reference other words.
Think about it like this, if you learn 20 radicals and 20 determinatives (the right part of the symbol), that's 40 symbols, but you've learned 400 words from all the combinations they make.
It's still memorizing a lot of symbols instead of something like an alphabet, but it's not as daunting as most people think.
Also the people complaining about it are always foreign learners. I'm sure there is a very small number of native speakers who whine about it but when you're surrounded by Hanzi it's hard to not learn it. Seems kinda fucked up to tell someone their 4000 year old writing system "doesn't make sense" and "there are no benefits to it compared to alphabets". The Chinese are doing fine with it. I'm not looking it up but I guarantee literacy is much higher than America.
Modern Chinese script isn't purely logographic, most of the characters are radical-phonetic. Like the word 媽 (mā) means mother, it combines the radical (left part of the character) for woman 女 with the sound of the word for horse 馬 (ma) indicating that the word sounds the same. A lot of characters show up a lot purely as their phonetic sound, which is why you can sometimes guess how a character is pronounced even if you've never seen it before with that radical. And I think the characters used for phonetics repeat a lot, and they often reference other words.
Think about it like this, if you learn 20 radicals and 20 determinatives (the right part of the symbol), that's 40 symbols, but you've learned 400 words from all the combinations they make.
It's still memorizing a lot of symbols instead of something like an alphabet, but it's not as daunting as most people think.
Also the people complaining about it are always foreign learners. I'm sure there is a very small number of native speakers who whine about it but when you're surrounded by Hanzi it's hard to not learn it. Seems kinda fucked up to tell someone their 4000 year old writing system "doesn't make sense" and "there are no benefits to it compared to alphabets". The Chinese are doing fine with it. I'm not looking it up but I guarantee literacy is much higher than America.
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