So &quot;just&quot; make a different word then. You make it sound so easy. Make about 100,000 of them (also taking into account an arbitrarily sized subset of frequently used compound words) to substitute for the roughly 1,200-1,300 Chinese sounds in use.<p>One you have &quot;just&quot; made your different words, then you can &quot;just&quot; teach them to one billion or so people, and you are done.<p>What does make sense is that languages evolved over long periods of time. People didn&#x27;t &quot;just&quot; make different words that everyone suddenly used. Just as English has &quot;digest your food&quot; and &quot;Reader&#x27;s Digest&quot; with different intonation, Chinese distinguishes meanings and words with different intonation as well. Not exactly the same because there&#x27;s also a difference in the written form in most cases. It doesn&#x27;t have to make sense... it just is.