Oh not that I know of, I didn't get very far learning chinese but a word is just a word.
Couldn't be farther from the truth. A single character in Chinese rarely has much meaning on its own. Phrases consisting of >=2 characters relate more directly to words in English. Usually the characters composing a phrase each contribute aspects of their individual definitions to create the meaning of the whole phrase. Like it is entirely possible to see a phrase consisting of characters that you recognize but yet be unable to identify the meaning of the phrase. This is not super common but it can happen.
Sometimes it's more complicated b/c the words in the phrase derive from say some kind of ancient expression, so the phrase has basically become an idiom. Chinese has tons and tons and tons of idioms whose meanings are rarely obvious from the composing characters.
And even amongst phrases with "clearly" defined meanings, usage can be complex. English has the same issues--like saying that someone passed away vs dying. Some expressions are impolite in certain circumstances which are usually not obvious from the definition.
Like if you pop open a Chinese dictionary, you'll see entries for various words. These are organized by the number of strokes in the radical (more below) & the number of strokes in the rest of the word. (Stroke = brush strokes used to write the word formally.) In relatively modern times, there is also a phonetic lookup table that lists all words with each phonetic spelling (Chinese has a recent phonetic alphabet: bopomofo i think is the english spelling; pinyin is based on that). But the dictionary listing for each word, you'll see a description of what the word means on its own, which most people don't read. Then you'll see a ton of common phrases starting with that word. For example:
http://www.zhongwen.com/d/169/x241.htm
And that's not even all the possible phrases with fang4. But it demonstrates the complexity. Like at the end of the list, there's fang4zhi4. Both fang4 and zhi4 could be individually translated as "to put/place." So what the hell does it mean to combine them? Why not use one word individually? How do you know when each is appropriate? (Suffice it to say zhongwen.com often doesn't have enough detail in its definitions, lol)
But it's not at all reasonable to compare 3000 characters to 30,000 words and say one person has a bigger vocabulary. For example, that 30,000 word count includes verb tenses. Chinese does not have verb tenses (instead, it uses "helper" words to signify events in relative time--like "will" or "already"). It might include plurals, which Chinese also does not have (you use like specific numbers or a helper word that basically means "group of"). It definitely includes proper nouns, which for Chinese people would just be combinations of the 3000 characters that don't really have any meaning--either a phonetic representation of a foreigner's name or a Chinese name. But you also can't count the net sum of phrases in Chinese either, b/c there are definitely tons of phrases where knowing the composing words gives you the meaning. Or things that are similar to each other so that knowing one lets you intuit the others.
Lastly, individual Chinese characters are not devoid of meaning or structure. If I recall correctly (and I am by no means a scholar on Chinese language so this is very, very rough), there are 6 classes of Chinese characters. The characters are classified according to how they are constructed. Like one class stems from simple characters that derive directly from when Chinese looked more like hieroglyphs. Another class comes from combining existing characters into a new character, and so on. I don't remember what they all are.
On top of that, every chinese character has (or is) a radical. The radical is like the "theme" for the word. Like words with the water radical mean that the rest of the word has something to do with liquid/flowing or that kind of notion. Thus while river, fountain, (to) drink, oil, etc all have different characters, they all share the same radical. The non-radical part of the word often contributes meaning as well (but sometimes it just contributes the sound), but I'm not familiar w/how this works b/c I'm a noob basically, lol. This system has some similarity to english words composed of prefix+(affix+)suffix combinations, like biology (bio=life, ology=study of). But then again, the construction of chinese phrases can often be related to that idea in English as well... like mathematics = shu3fa3. shu3=to count, fa3=method of.
Basically, both languages are complex in their own ways. Where one language is complex (verb conjugation rules), the other language might be simple (no tenses). But in trade, the "helper" words used to express tense in Chinese have usages that are rather difficult to explain (in fact people still write linguistic papers trying to identify exact rules). Like if you asked a Chinese person why, given 2 semantically equivalent expressions, only 1 of them is reasonable, you're very likely to get a response like "well the first one just sounds right." Whereas in English there are often more carefully spelled out rules: like "I runned" is wrong b/c the rule says run->ran.
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