It's a remarkable fact, I think, that spoken modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) has only about 400 distinct syllables ignoring tones. With the 4 tones plus neutral pronunciation, there are about 1300, maybe 1500 (including rare ones) distinct syllables. They're basically all of the form

  consonant (optional) + vowel/diphthong + n/ng (optionally)

(typically called "initial + final" in this context).

(Note that older Chinese "dialects" such as Cantonese or Teochew retain many more distinct syllables. For example, the infamous "shi shi shi shi" "poem", consisting only of "shi" sounds in Mandarin (neglecting tones), contains 11 distinct syllables (neglecting tones) in Teochew.)

English or German, on the other hand, have somewhere around 8000 distinct syllables. (Think of "strict", "fractal", "Angstschweiß", "Hampsthwaite", "strengths", etc.)