Why Are Chinese Characters So Complicated？

Chinese characters are often criticized for being overly complicated.Roman letters give relatively precise information on pronunciation，but no information on meaning.In contrast，Chinese characters give less precise（and sometimes no）pronunciation information，but do give information on meaning.This is very important for Chinese because of the huge number of characters in Chinese which sound the same but have different meanings.For instance，the characters and dozens of others all have identical pronunciation.

More phonetic and semantic information can be contained in the characters with less complexity，much as the spelling of English can be both less complicated and more informative.

For instance，all characters with the same pronunciation can be given the same phonetic component，with radicals used to differentiate meaning.The excess complexity arises because Chinese characters have gradually accumulated over several millennia，with only two main attempts at standardization.The first，by Prime Minister Li Si（280-208 BC）under the First Emperor of Qin，reduced the complexity and also increased the phonetic and semantic information content.The second，in the 1950s under the Chinese government，reduced the complexity.

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