/lit/ - Literature

>>9680128
>Chinese has a much larger repository of phrases/idioms like chengyu among others that condense very large amounts of menaing/anecdotes/story/history into a brief phrase

I would say this is the crux of the matter. Think of the meanings evoked by reading "red in tooth and claw", "to everything there is a season," "Am I my brother's keeper?"

An uncharitable view of Chinese history would place the popularization of woodblock-printing literature near ~900 CE, with evidence pointing at ~600 CE - and we're not even talking about older literature copied by hand. Suffice it to say there is a metric fuckton of literary canon to reference.

>>9681211
>even her author photo shows a mildly concerned expression

w o r r y

>>9681259
Don't feel too bad - you only need to know 2000 to 3000 characters to read a newspaper, with the average high schooler knowing 4000, and the average adult knowing 8000. Compare this with the fact that average Chinese dictionaries include ~50,000 words -- this is because they tend not to drop arcane words from their lexicon, which helps people read classical texts.

>>9681294
You don't need to conjugate Chinese verbs in the English sense, if that's what you mean. The word 'go' in your sentence would be the same in both the present and past tense.