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Comment by maxrmk | Hacker News Reader

> By the Song dynasty, since all literate people could be assumed to have memorized the text, the order of its characters was used to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical order is used in alphabetic languages.

I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can’t imagine this.

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There are mnemonics to help remember the characters. For example:

- 嫉 (jealousy) is composed of 女 (woman) and 疾 (illness, hatred): jealousy is a feminine illness or a manifestation of feminine hatred;

- 惑 (to be puzzled) is composed of 心 (heart, intention) 或 (maybe, possibility): an unsure heart;

- 愚 (to be stupid) is composed of 心 (heart, intention) 禸 (trample) 田 (field): the heart of someone who tramples a field (and thus ruining the crops);

etc.

You often have to be creative. If I understand the research correctly[0], finding such interpretations used to be common, and different people would debate different interpretations.

I've actually wrote a tool to help studying Chinese from that perspective, by allowing to read classics such as the Thousand Character Classic[1], and systematically decomposing characters.

[0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf

[1]: https://zhongmu.eu/book.html#c=2;w=0;b=qian-zi-wen (~unusable on mobile screens).

There's a Languagelog blog post from years ago on the difficulties that even native speakers of Chinese languages have in looking up words in dictionaries. Collation is a serious problem.

> I struggle enough with 26 letters! I genuinely can’t imagine this.

alphabets are like x86 instructions of phonemes, Chinese scripts on the other hand is the "bytecode" of many languages (mandarin/cantonese/you-name-it). The first emperor of China unified text writing but not the pronouciations

Not true. You know uppercase, lowercase, and cursive, as well as iconography used commonly in the west for various road signs, currencies, and governments. You know flags and warning labels.

Kanji is just a superset of that.

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