For as long as I’ve been in China I’ve been told, and have told others, that the reason the Chinese language is so impossibly difficult to learn is because of its alphabet of 50,000,000,000,000,000 characters, each strokingly more confusing than the last.

However, I think it’s time to set the record straight. Comparing the number of different Chinese characters to the 26 letters of the English alphabet is a gross misunderstanding of written Chinese.

Though it is true that written Chinese has in around 6,000 “active” characters, to even be considered “literate” in China you need to be able to…