How many characters (alphabets) are there in chinese language?
Long story for those who are partient: First of all, a Chinese character is more heavy-weight than an English alphabet. For example, there is a Chinese character representing “hand”, another one representing “bag.” However, many English words can be repersented in Chinese by combining the characters. For example, to describe hand bag, you literally put the character “hand” and “bag” side-by-side. The formation of name of different fish spices is more like the swordfish, in the sense the name usually follows the pattern of one character (of some descriptive or arbitrary) with the character “fish.” So when you come across with a fish you don’t recognize, you could guess it refers to some sort of fish. So the comparison with English alphabet is not exactly an apple-to-apple comparison. The number of characters is much more than the 26 alphabeters but signficantly less than the total number of English words. New characters keep coming out from time to time (like how English words come out.
