Seems like he's trying to make a point just for the sake of it. For a start yeah as a German I don't understand the example headline he's giving there even thou

Seems like he's trying to make a point just for the sake of it. For a start yeah as a German I don't understand the example headline he's giving there even though I started learning English some 20 years ago. So what does that tell us? Apparently English is even harder than Chinese.. Or maybe that you'll eventually stumble upon an unknown word every now and then and can quickly look it up. Reading a Chinese newspaper knowing 2000 characters is absolutely possible. You can either just rely on good old guessing from context since, you know, the headline is usually followed by an article, or you just look that word up. It's really not like you will stumble at ever other character since like that guy even admits 95% are already covered by the 2000 you know. Imagine reading the sports section for the first time. You might find a dozen characters or words you don't know, but after a week or two you'll eventually know enough Chinese terms regarding soccer. Same for any specific topic in any foreign language. As for the character combos, first of all while learning it's not like you memorize each character separately, you're usually given some examples of such combinations using characters you already learned, phrases to go along with it etc. For many combinations its even pretty easy to guess what they mean.