ComradeMan

No problem. Glad I could help.

The position is inherent to the morpheme, they have to 'fit' certain slots to really produce meaningful words. That's how it works with "revolutionary" or any word in any language; it's more about the language(s) than about the script. A script is always a result of a language; speech comes first. The direction predominantly used today is left-to-right. Historically, from top to bottom. But I am a starting linguist, not an expert on the Chinese languages or script. Linguists are concerned with univeralities, so I can only help you so much.

But I'd suggest you ask RedStarOverChina if you want to know more; he knows about the language and script more than I do and I am sure he is willing to answer any questions (I can't promise that of course!).

I have never read a Chinese newspaper, but I thought you need to know about 5000 characters. But in combination the meaning is different from the parts, as I said before.

The characters correspond to morphemes which are the smallest units of language containing meaning. If you know the Latin morphemes re-, vol-, -utionem and the French/English -air/-ary, you might understand such a word: "the one who is rolling things in/back/in a different path". The morphemes in my username have different meanings, though; it's not a script used for languages of the same language family. A literal translation might be more like: "the one who is living to change (the fate)".

Chinese literates just have to know many of these morphemes, otherwise they have to be explained to them, but the same morphemes exist in the Chinese languages, like Mandarin. But as we all do, many memorise these in their context; morphemes are not discrete. A dictionary could use a phonetic alphabet to transcribe the words into the many Chinese languages and dialects.

By the use of a phonetic alphabet (like our own). But there are specialised scripts for near-perfect encoding of speech segments. They use IPA in most dictionaries. But ours with some diacritics does work well enough with some help of a native speaker (Mandarin e.g. is a tone language, so can be tricky for most people).

Yes id does mean that. The Japanese just copy everything :-p They have the choice of three scripts. Though I guess we all have that choice; I like the Chinese script because it encodes meaning instead of speech sounds/segments (as our alphabet does).