Counting words versus counting letters of the alphabet

I found a closed thread on counting words in Japanese. How unfortunate!
Today, I posted an essay to be corrected in Japanese and was disappointed to find that every letter in Japanese was being counted as if it were a Chinese character. The Japanse use characters just as the Chinese do, but most of the writing is in a quasi phonetic alphabet. Most of the alphabet represents 2 sounds, but in any case, a sound does not equal a word. The question is, what is a word in these languages? Certainly, a phonetic alphabet symbol is not a word.
As a result of this linguistically thoughtless way of counting words, in Japanese, the length of an essay to be corrected is sharply curtailed.
I realize that a computer makes these delicate decisions, but give me a break. Making phonetic alphabet symbols equal to a word is not fair. If this comment were treated as Japanese is, I would have already reached my 200-word limit.

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