Hello Romulus, Any character in Chinese hanzi 汉字 is represented by 1 syllable. There is no such character that equals more than 1 syllable . A 2 syllable word will be represented by 2 characters , a 3 word by 3 characters etc. Adding up 1 syllable character to the word could change its meaning .Look for example at this word: 图书馆员 tu2shu1guan3yuan2 = librarian This is a 4 syllable word represented by 4 syllables not more or less, yet each character represents a word by it self ,adding up a character gives the total characters a new meaning : 图 means diagram, chart , picture ,map 书means book 馆 means house or establishment , embassy ,consulate 员 means member or employee Now add up the characters : 图书 means also books specially in a library or bookstore 图书馆 means a library 图书馆员 librarian Obviously each syllable equals 1 character . That is what concerns simplified Chinese characters ,I don't know about the traditional ones,although I think they apply the same concept. Maybe Chinese natives could elaborate.

yes. every character is one syllabe. you can't compare word formation in chinese with word formation in other languague whose grammar and phonetical rules are different. note that a character not always equals a word, but yes a concept (even if unspecific). also note that a character may have more than one corresponding syllabe. that's to say, some characters admit two syllabes as for reading them. About what Cherry says. the fact to writte a character in modern fashion or traditional doesn't affect the character in any aspect except the visual one. The rule one character one syllabe doesn't apply to japanese (maybe you noticed that and that's why you ask this), japanese adopted chinese writting adapting the characters to concepts not to pronounciation, that's why any kanji may be pronounced with one , two or more syllabes.

Right. :) Each Traditional Chinese character is represented as well by 1 syllable only. And I should like to add something more to this question: Nowadays too many Chinese words (usually contain 2 characters) were once represented by one character. As you have noticed the word 朋友 in the case, which is created by combining single-word synonyms with each other. This phenomenon could be commonly seen. For example: 休息 (xiu1 xi) means: rest, relax 停止 (ting2 zhi3) or 终止 (zhong1 zhi3) means: stop, cease 死亡 (si3 wang2) means: die, decease 研究 (yan2 jiu1) means: research 比较 (bi3 jiao4) means: compare