"Vocabulary" means: a. all the words which exist in a language or a subject; e.g. Medicine has its own vocabulary. e.g. French vocabulary is not so easy to master. b. all the words known by a person; e.g. John, who came first in our class, had an extensive vocabulary. One Chinese "character" is one Chinese word. "Vocabulary" and "character" are vastly different. It is impossible to confuse the two.

Character in Chinese means single alphabet or single Chinese word, but vocabulary stands for words or several words putting together that means something, such as A(Character) and apple(vocabulary), 我(单字) and 我们(词语)。

Vocabulary refers to a set of words. A Chinese character is a syllable written with a set of strokes together. In English the characters are the letters of the alphabet.