/sci/ - Science & Math

1. Chinese combines agglutinative word derivation with regular analytic grammar, avoiding both the difficulty of synthetic languages and the large vocabularies needed by isolating languages. English takes the worst of both sides, having highly irregular remnants of lost synthetic grammar, and almost no useful word derivation.

2. No features "unlearnable" for foreigners, like noun cases or articles.

3. Tiny vocabulary, per 1. ~3500 characters is sufficient even for science heavy topics.

4. Pronunciation on the simpler side; a restricted set of simple syllables, with no unusual features. (tone doesn't seem to be a problem in practice except for people who reached advanced levels while ignoring tones, and tones are not uncommon worldwide)
English has one of the largest vowel inventories, several rare consonants, and complex syllables.

5. The everyday way of expression is highly literal; almost everything what is said is meant literally, what is meant figuratively usually makes no literal sense.
English has an elaborate system of hinting and avoidance speech that may be hard to master for speakers of unrelated langauges; things that make sense literally may not be meant literally and this may lead to unnoticeable misunderstandings, as literally meant statements of foreign speakers may be interpreted in highly unpredictable ways by native speakers; truthful statements can imply lies and seemingly innocuous comments may be interpreted as insults.

Some counterarguments:
>It is still necessary to learn over 3000 characters to be fully fluent.
English also needs to be memorized to a large extent, since the spelling is unpredictable.

>My dictionary lists 196000 words
>for example, you can say 漂亮, 美丽, 秀美,美秀, 艳丽, 绚丽, 佳美, or even stuff like 窈窕.

Most of those are obvious and don't need to be learned separately. 漂 may actually a case of a missing character, since all the other instances are pronounced piao1

https://universeofmemory.com/how-many-words-you-should-know/
>Language Level Number of Base Words Needed
>A1 500
>A2 1000
>B1 2000
>B2 4000
>C1 8000
>C2 16000
>If you were to concentrate on words from the frequency list, you would definitely have to deduct 20% on higher levels (B1-C2).

For those unfamiliar: https://tracktest.eu/english-levels-cefr/

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO
(http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php appears to include classical chinese as well)

500 words is listed for A1 level, which gives you roughly 75% comprehension. Which isn't very good, but hey, we are comparing it with the most basic foreign language level that is seen as worth mentioning.
A2's 1000 words already give you 89% comprehension. Not good, but not bad for somebody who is supposed to
>Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment).
B1, 1800 words give you a nice 96% comprehension.
B2 3600 already give you 99.56% comprehension of any random text. You probably don't really need more in your life.
C1 7200 give you 99.99621868317% comprehension; You know specific words for things like orange red silk, soil with large clay content, ytterbium, "evil look of deep-set eyes", as well as plenty of words some dictionaries find not worth mentioning.
C2, you know every word there is in the available corpus, and some more on top of that.


Does this unique ability of Chinese to express so much with so little vocabulary make it especially suited for international communication and science?