Relax Up Here

Not really. Chinese uses a writing system called logographic that is very different from our writing system. Each symbols, or letter, in our writing stands for a sound; one or more symbols put together form a word, and we can form any word in our language using just our 26 letters. But in Chinese, each symbol stands for a word. A student learning to read and write Chinese must learn a symbol for every word – that’s like having to learn an ‘alphabet’ with thousands of letters. One Chinese dictionary lists almost 50,000 different symbols! The five English words that are used more than any others in the language are, in order: the, of, and, to, a. the second five most common words are: in, that, is, I, and it. But the most common word in conversation is – I, of course! The letter e is the most common in English. But the letter that begins the most English words is it.