Chinese has 4000 commonly used words and 2000 ancient or less common words. The English language has 174,000 or more words and this creates problem when it comes to translation.
The Chinese has to use a combination of words to express an equivlant single English word, for example:
Computer is translated as Electricity brain (Chinese dosen't have adjective ending with -ic either, a noun is used instead), a 2-word group.
Merchant is tranlated as "person who trades" which is made up of 3 Chinese words that literally translates as Bear Idea Person. The wisdom of our Chinese ancestor says that a person who bears new idea would like to trade the idea for money. You cannot get more poetic than that!
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Another thing about Chinese language is about too many "破音字" (same character but different pronunciation ang meaning).
For example : 湯匙 (tang1 chi2 = soup spoon) and 鑰匙(yao4 shi = key).
Those things are really confusing.
Even Chinese language has 6000 characters, it's still hard to learn compare with English who has 174,000 words.
I have studied Chinese for 9 months but it doesn't prove anything.
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