[2/2] What if there are no Chinese characters? It would be the same. It's the same in all Sino-Tibetan languages; even if that language has no written form, we should explain what characters are sometimes. How? It's easy, just like the cases in Mandarin. For example, sometimes we are with the help of words, when we say "chīfàn de chī" ("chi" in "chi fan"), we know it's 吃; but when we say "chīyóu de chī"("chi" in "chi you"), we know it's 蚩. Now you know, "characters" is just an abstract concept of Sino-Tibetan languages. There might be an opposite example to help you understand it. When we talk about Chinese characters, one character could be in a different form. This could be done only if "character" is an abstract concept of the language. We call it 异体字. For example, we consider 兌 and 兑 are the same character (as you see, they are two characters physically, but one character in abstract), and 溫 and 温 are the same character. ----------- I wrote this because some learners believe parts of the Simplified Chinese characters are the basic elements of the characters' meaning. But not. However, this is not an article on this topic, but rather a related one. Learners who approach learning Chinese in this way sometimes lead to misunderstandings.