@tigertiger and @dazzer, I think you guys jumped the gun when you saw me using the word "words" to describe "syllables". Clearly there are more than 2,000 words in Chinese, but there are only 2,000 unique syllables. BIG DIFFERENCE, but I used the word "words" instead of syllable but trying to infer the same meaning. From the context and my other posts you would have recognized what I mean though.

Chinese makes more complex words from a combination of these individual 2,000 syllables. That's a primary reason why foreign loanwords can generally not be successfully transcribed into Chinese - there are too few syllables available. It's also difficult to directly compare a language like Chinese with it's character based writing system to one that uses an alphabet like English. Having said that though, English has by far the most extensive vocabulary of any language because it continues to borrow heavily from other languages. Chinese is different. You can create new words too, but these new "words" only arise from a combination of existing syllables. Consider for example, the word "India". India is India in virtually every language. However, not in Chinese, because there are no syllables corresponding to "In-Dee-ya" or "In-dia" or "In-dya" depending on how you want to spell out the individual syllables. Yes, the syllable "ya" exists in Chinese, but in the end, it becomes "Yin-du", the same word used to describe the Hindu religion.

www.chinese-forums.com/[...]

I don't think you guys are getting me. While there might be thousands upon thousands of "words" with different meanings in Chinese, the vast majority of these are homonyms. There are only 2,000 unique syllables. All of the 370,000 "words" that you have described, Dazzer, are some combination of these 2,000 basic syllables, of which 400 are unique and accounting for the 5 possible tones that makes 2000. Given that according to Chinese grammar, no differences are made according to time, gender and there are no articles (such as "a" or "the"), this naturally also means that you get fewer possible words.

The vast number of homonyms makes Chinese a super difficult language to learn in my opinion. If Chinese had more distinct words it'd make learning the language easier, not more difficult (at least for me), but well, it is what it is.

Still don't believe me? Consider the word "zhong" high tone. It can have literally dozens of meanings and the characters used will be different (although in my example they both use the same radical). Consider 中 and 钟. Both are pronounced exactly the same, but the first one means middle and the second one means time or o'clock as in "ji dian zhong?" (what time is it) or "si dian zhong" (4 O'clock). There are at least 50 meanings for the word "shi" falling tone, plus hundreds more for "shi" with the other tone markers. Yes this would mean that there are possibly 500 words with distinct meanings for the syllable "shi", but they all sound almost the same (and 50 of them sound EXACTLY the same) since "shi" is a homonym.

English and other languages also use homonyms but there are far, far fewer homonyms in English than in Chinese. I'm not going to go into any details about the large number of polysyllabic homonyms in Chinese, but naturally, they are just as numerous.

Or you can fly with any international (non-mainland Chinese) carrier, such as Lao Airlines, Thai Airways or DragonAir that flies from Kunming. Naturally they all accept international credit cards too, irrespective whether you use their call center, website or office to book.

Oh and when I said 2000 distinct words in Chinese, I already accounted for the 5 possible tones, so there are really only 400 distinct words without tone markers. These 2000 words are merely monosyllabic words, meaning that if you put any combination of one of these syllables together with another one, you get a new word. This concept accounts for the perception that tigertiger must have about the "many" words in Chinese, which of course don't exist in the context that I've explained. While there could well be 50,000 unique words if you account for all the possibilities (this includes both mono and polysyllabic words, although in Chinese few words have more than 2 syllables), it still causes confusion for learners from languages that have more sophisticated vocabularies such as English.

This is because in English, we rarely think of our words as being able to be broken down into syallables with individual meanings. In Chinese, the word "meiguo" carries the meaning "America" but it can also be broken down into "mei" meaning beautiful and "guo" meaning country. Thus three words are created with three distinct meanings. In English you can't do that.

@tigertiger, Chinese does NOT have a lot of words and nearly every foreigner that starts studying Chinese complains that everything sounds the same. What you probably mean is that 是 is one word with a distinct meaning, while 时 is another, which I recognize. However, both words sound the same except for differences in tonality. The only way to recognize the differences is a keen ear, or failing that, being able to read the characters.

A better example would be where you have words that have the exact same pronunciation and tonality, but have very different meanings. In that context, sure Chinese has plenty of "words" but it doesn't have plenty of distinct, non-homophones. As mentioned, Chinese has a mere 2,000 distinct words. I'm not sure how many distinct words English has, but it could easily be in excess of 100,000. Even Thai has 20,000-40,000+ distinct, individual words, because unlike Chinese, Thai is at least able to borrow freely from foreign languages for loanwords.

Although my Chinese is still rusty, I am fairly certain that there are only a minimal number of loanwords in Chinese because the limited number of sounds means most loanwords would be impossible to transcribe. Even the loanwords that Chinese has taken on don't really sound like the original. It had to be pointed out to me by my Chinese teacher that the Chinese word 幽默 (you mo) comes from the English word "humor" or "humour" (British spelling). To me, youmo sounds nothing like humor whereas even somebody with no knowledge of Thai would be able to recognize that คอมพิวเตอร์ (com pew toer) means computer just by listening to a Thai speaker say this word.

I therefore strongly suggest at least getting some knowledge of the most common Chinese characters (perhaps the 300 most common should do). Learn to recognize them, but if you don't want to spend time writing them, then don't. However, don't make the mistake of assuming it's easy to get by in China illiterate in the Chinese writing system. Given Chinese is perhaps the most homophonal language in the world, great confusion and difficulties in communication can occur if you just rely on the spoken language. Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, English, German, French, Spanish etc. can all be spoken and understood without an absolute need to be able to read or write them, but using the same approach for Chinese is difficult to say the least.