Did you know that regarding native languages over a billion people speak Chinese, whereas only 350 million people speak English?
Although English is extensively spoken around the world by many people as a second language, its native speakers are not that many as they are in Chinese.
There are several discussions about the dominance of Chinese over the language of computers, however its main disadvantage is that Chinese has 60,000 characters!
After Chinese the second most widely spoken language is Spanish with 400 million people.
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Thank you for your article! I am glad that you wrote an article featuring Chinese. However, I would like to point out that it may be somewhat misleading to directly compare 26 English Alphabets to 60,000 Chinese "letter alphabets", as Chinese has no alphabets per se!
While English alphabets by themselves are meaningless and must join and form words to convey a message (with the possible exception of the article "a"), Chinese "letter alphabets" can exist alone and carry meaning, for example 人("human"), 月("moon") and many more. Hence it would be more precise to call them Chinese characters.
I believe the closest thing in Chinese that resembles alphabets are "radicals". They are the building blocks that join together to form words. For example, 雲("cloud") is made of the radicals 雨(the radical that hints the meaning of the word - related to rain) and 云(the radical that conveys the sound of the character)
Of course this is just an example, there are many more methods to combine radicals and they have different significance as well. Moreover I believe radicals are just closer to alphabets than whole characters, but they cannot be compared directly. I hope this little extra information is helpful. (:
Thank you very much for your comment and your linguistic clarification, which was very helpful. English and Chinese belong to a totally different linguistic family and cannot be compared on equal terms, indeed.