Nobody reads alphabetical languages character to character. English words are composed of components too. It's highly inaccurate to say that you only have to memorize 27 characters in English when you actually have to memorize way more to understand words.
I think this issue stems from historically Han text being used for more languages than just Mandarin. Han text being written in a vernacular Mandarin style is a quite recent invention.
Chinese has an advantage in that you can often devise a meaning from characters in a way you often can’t in English, but not pronunciation.
Funnily enough, the recent popularity of compound words in Chinese has made this even better.
For a commonly cited example, 火山 which means volcano, is literally composed of "fire mountain". 计算机 literally means computing machine. An alternative writing of computer, 电脑, literally means electric brain.
you've got it completely backwards. Library is also 'book building' but in fucked up latin.
you can figure out english meanings of words through germanic, latin, and greek roots & how the other word parts modify it---but pronunciation is completely arbitrary. a very casual relationship exists in english between how even directly borrowed words are pronounced vis-a-vis their original language
So, like English?
Nobody reads alphabetical languages character to character. English words are composed of components too. It's highly inaccurate to say that you only have to memorize 27 characters in English when you actually have to memorize way more to understand words.
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I think this issue stems from historically Han text being used for more languages than just Mandarin. Han text being written in a vernacular Mandarin style is a quite recent invention.
Funnily enough, the recent popularity of compound words in Chinese has made this even better.
For a commonly cited example, 火山 which means volcano, is literally composed of "fire mountain". 计算机 literally means computing machine. An alternative writing of computer, 电脑, literally means electric brain.
You can also apply some of that knowledge to Japanese and vice versa
This is more true of Vietnamese, Spanish, Turkish, Indonesian etc.
It's less true of English where memorization plays a big role
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you've got it completely backwards. Library is also 'book building' but in fucked up latin.
you can figure out english meanings of words through germanic, latin, and greek roots & how the other word parts modify it---but pronunciation is completely arbitrary. a very casual relationship exists in english between how even directly borrowed words are pronounced vis-a-vis their original language