A simple explanation of Chinese characters
From my experience, this article brushes a very rosy picture of the Chinese language.<p>The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don&#x27;t know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it&#x27;s simple enough, you may  guess, but that&#x27;s it.<p>Learning Chinese means memorizing characters. A lot of them. It takes over a decade to teach a Chinese kid to even read a simple magazine.<p>Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can&#x27;t use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You&#x27;re losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process.<p>This is why building a search engine in Chinese is so hard. You can&#x27;t apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there&#x27;s no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least).<p>Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. Since you don&#x27;t separate words with spaces in Chinese, good luck figuring things out programmatically. Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context.<p>Learning Chinese can be an interesting challenge, but understand that it will mostly rely on memorizing characters with little to no logic or trick to help you do so.