It is quite common to find people judging the Chinese language as extremely complex from comparing the 26 letters in English (or the dozens of letters in other languages) with thousands of characters in Chinese, which is not true.

经常能看到有人在说明汉语的复杂度时拿英语中的 26 个字母（或其他语言中的几十个字母）跟汉语中的数千个汉字作对比，但这种比较是不恰当的。

The following method is the proper approach of such a comparison in my opinion, which was tweeted on 2017-04-16. It is now reposted here, taken as an archive. (Click the image to check the original size.)

以下是我认为合适的对比方法，于 2017-04-16 发布在推特帐号上。这里再发布以作为存档（点击图片查看原始尺寸）。