Totally agree on that score.

The big challenge I find when working with Chinese Kanxi (as they spell it) is trying to place the characters in context. AS you will understand, not only are the individual characters built from a bunch of smaller characters (the base 214 radicals), but each word is often built from a couple of characters so we westerners read the characters ok but have to ba able to put them into their real context. Even Chinese take considerable thinking time (by comparison to reading English) to do this.

Classic case in point is that the words 'Be Careful' are built from the two primary characters (which are also base radicals) 'Small Heart'. Any Chinese will immediately read that as 'Be Careful' unles it is a medical work describing someones heart. Then we get dialects. In Cantonese (Guangdonghua) the above is 'Siu Sam' but in Putonghua (Mandarin) it is 'Xiao Xin'.

Interestingly when we look at a lot of English words, (esp Germanic) they are build from multiple smaller words. Gerspringenwerken (just a guess :-).

Cheers

Doug

(posted from an alt account due to blocking of the original post)