This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the lang

This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the language and there is no bijection between the two sets (as expected for a phonetic system). In the end, the number of combinations to memorize for reading perfectly is probably in the hundred or multiple hundreds. French has the same problem. It takes years to train natives to write to perfection; and the non-phonetic nature of the script bites hard the foreign learners. Second, at its core the Chinese writing evolved from a limited set of symbols to represent syllabes. The current system is still mainly based on it and the knowledge of around 400 components can help read and memorize of lot more characters. The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is not apparent to people who doesn't studied it, but it exists.