Mandarin beginner here. On #2, my pet theory is that it's easier to disambiguate zǒulù than just zǒu in the spoken language. My teacher often says "word's chara

Mandarin beginner here. On #2, my pet theory is that it's easier to disambiguate zǒulù than just zǒu in the spoken language. My teacher often says "word's character" (e.g. yī de yīshēng, 醫的醫生, probably bad example and/or just wrong, to distinguish from other characters that sound like 醫). I once calculated that there are only about 600 different sounds in Mandarin -- not many more than toki pona! -- so if you tend to pair sounds into concepts, that's a much richer pool to draw from.