Hi

Bearing in mind that I have no experience in any form of Chinese whatsoever, I hope you will forgive me for asking a potentially ridiculous question. All the European and Slavonic languages have some form of alphabet -and in addition to all of these, Japanese does, too, even though there are effectively four alphabets in Japanese. My question is this - as there does not seem to be an "alphabet" in Chinese (of course, correct me if I'm wrong) how do you read the characters? Is it a case of learning basic ones and learning additional sounds as the characters acquire additional meanings through, perhaps, the addition of new characters onto basic ones? Or is it a case of memorising how every single Chinese character is pronounced, with no correlation at all between what the character looks like and how it's pronounced? I realise that there would be no way around learning stroke order, how to write the characters themselves, and something I have a very vague idea about called "tone", though.

Any explanation at all would be fascinating. If anyone could provide examples through actual Chinese characters or pinyin, that would, of course, be even better! Thanks

Jack