> To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols.
Replace English with any other language using the latin alphabet and this doesn't hold up as there is no indication of meaning. For that matter, there's not a strong indication of pronunciation. I may know English and French but that doesn't help me understand Hungarian or Swedish.
I do not know Chinese but my understanding is those 3000 characters are not only glyphs, they are elements of meaning. Incidentally, that is the same order of magnitude of words one needs to know to read an English paper, with the difference that in English, there is a portion of the meaning that is encoded in grammar, ie. the relation & order of words. That a cognitive overhead we take for granted in our language system.
That's the point though. To learn Hungarian or Swedish, you'll have to learn the spoken language, and then reading and writing comes essentially for free.
In Chinese, you have to learn the spoken language, and then you have spend just as much time (if not more) to learn the written language.
Many Chinese characters do contain elements of meaning and elements of pronunciation, but that doesn't mean that you don't have to learn them.
"Dilapidated" contains elements of its meaning in the root lapis = stone, but you'd be hard pressed to deduce the meaning from it.
Replace English with any other language using the latin alphabet and this doesn't hold up as there is no indication of meaning. For that matter, there's not a strong indication of pronunciation. I may know English and French but that doesn't help me understand Hungarian or Swedish.
I do not know Chinese but my understanding is those 3000 characters are not only glyphs, they are elements of meaning. Incidentally, that is the same order of magnitude of words one needs to know to read an English paper, with the difference that in English, there is a portion of the meaning that is encoded in grammar, ie. the relation & order of words. That a cognitive overhead we take for granted in our language system.