[T-R]

Practically speaking, things are more nuanced than the article would imply, though - they're not 3000 completely unique characters, and at least for a lot of nouns, the radicals do serve to broadly categorize things as, e.g. "related to water", which can serve as a reading aid similar to how root words do. The author further claims "With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper.", but that's only accurate insofar as reading means "pronouncing"; it's a tradeoff with being able to infer meaning.