[fleshfly]

I always considered this a bizarre argument. Chinese characters are more alike English words than English letters. English also has thousands of words, prefixes required to achieve competency. Chinese characters consist of only around 200 radicals, more than 26, but hardly thousands. I would say the smallest unit in Chinese is a stroke, of which there are 10. Theres just an extra dimension about where strokes are placed relative to each other that makes the characters seem complex, but if you study it for a few days you would find that there arent actually that many degrees of freedom. In other words, - strokes to letters - radicals to prefixes, suffices - characters to words