On Twitter, 140 Characters mean a lot in Chinese! why? In Chinese, almost every character is a word; In English, every character is just an alphabet, not a word, with minor exceptions of course. Chinese words are square blocks whereas English ones rectangle blocks. They shouldn't be of the same height.

I would argue that Chinese words convey more meaning per cm square. The same square space occupied by 5 rectangle capital alphabets is more than enough to display any Chinese character correctly.

BTW, you don't need to recognize every stroke to be able to identify a Chinese word. You can tell by its pictorial pattern, such as negative spaces.