I apologize for any offense, but that post is riddled with things that give me the impression the author himself doesn't really understand Chinese that well. F

I apologize for any offense, but that post is riddled with things that give me the impression the author himself doesn't really understand Chinese that well. For starters, the vast majority of words are two or more syllables. Even when individual characters are a distinct word, they often have multiple meanings depending on context. There just isn't a simple 1-1 mapping of characters to "meanings". I'm a fan of Heisig's RTK system, which it looks like you borrowed from heavily, but its main utility is building a scaffold to assist with writing before getting the sufficient practice to do it naturally. However using the system for reading is a horrible waste of time since reading things in context is one of the few ways of learning the collocations and general diction patterns necessary to be a functional user of a language. The bit about only needing 2000 characters is also clearly BS. Even an 11 year old elementary school student will read far more than that many (though the number they're required to write is lower especially in the first few grades. In another post on the same site, "Why is Mandarin so incredibly easy to learn?", I read the following: >To be an undergraduate at a Chinese university you need to know about 5,000 words This is 100% absolutely false. The popular red Oxford E-C/C-E dictionary contains well over a hundred thousand entries, and a typical undergrad will know nearly all of them as well as many other words not in the dictionary. Learning a language is a major undertaking and this kind of blog post is really doing everyone a disservice. Edit: Personally I've had experience learning over half a dozen languages to various levels, including Chinese. In my former work in Taiwan, I dealt customers almost exclusively in Mandarin for 3+ years. I can't claim to be a language expert, but I am familiar with what it takes to be functional in one. Learning a language is a major task. For some idea of what's involved, check out this book written by one of the most successful polyglots of the modern era: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2538379