>> There are no tenses in Mandarin for example Yes and No. You can explicitly state the time if that is what you need. >> Most Chinese have different levels o

>> There are no tenses in Mandarin for example Yes and No. You can explicitly state the time if that is what you need. >> Most Chinese have different levels of analphabetism because it has so many words I am sure not every people can remember all the words from the dictionary, which in the age of internet, is constantly evolving every day. In fact, this is one advantage of Chinese, you don't need to remember words one by one. Instead, you learn characters, the basic building blocks of word, many of which have its own semantic meanings.Then you can infer the meaning of a 'word'---a combination of characters on the fly. The core character set is about 3,000, and with that you could read newspaper without too much hassle. >>"I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words" Depends. Some words are imported as it is, e.g. 'NBA'/'DNA'/'MapReduce'. Some are being translated, like 'Frontend' -> Front(前)+end(端) -> 前端 'Memory' -> Internal(内) storage(存) -> 内存 'Compiler' -> Put-together(编) translation(译) machine(器) -> 编译器 I would say the direct-import kind of loan words is more popular right now, ever since the era of internet, because there is simply no abundant time to come up with a good translation, and more people are familiar and comfortable with English nowadays.