Spoken Chinese is weak in speech sounds because the language is monosyllabic. That is, each word has only one syllable.
The article goes on to talk about the small number of distinct syllables and the use of tones to add more sounds. This of course puzzled me, because I couldn't figure out how one could have a functional language with 400+ sounds, multiplied up to 1600 or so with tones. I pictued the need ot pick one of the 1600 sounds for each new word that comes into existence. Of course, this turns out to be an incorrect description of the spoken language, although I didn't really understand that until I started learning the language.
So if the World Book's description is incorrect, what is the truth? Well, a lot of Chinese words do have only one syllable. This makes for a lot of homonyms. There are also a lot of multisyllable words. An example would be zha4meng3, or grasshopper. Neither zha4 or meng3 mean anything on their own. In between are compound words, such as du2lun2che1 or unicycle. Du2lun2che1 is litterally "single-wheel-vehicle". Unicycle is derived from Latin and litterally means one-wheel. So are English and Chinese really that different. Most English words have root components, they just tend to come from Latin or French and they may be more than one syllable long. A lot of what makes Chinese appear monosyllabic is lack of loan words to mask the compound nature of the words.
A final reason why Chinese is not monosyllabic is that a lot of characters cannot be used as standalone words. A surprising example is hai2, which has a root meaning of "child". You cannot say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2". You must say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2zi" or ""Wo3 you3 yi4 ge xiao3hai2".
Now, it would be wrong to say that Chinese is constructed just like English. While many words in both languages are built from root parts, Chinese has a more limited set of components to draw from and the building blocks are more obvious than in English. Even so, though, to call Chinese monosyllabic is an oversimplifcations.
