* Chinese doesn't use letters in the same way as English or other alphabetic languages. Chinese uses characters, which are symbols that represent words, morphemes, or concepts.
* There are thousands of Chinese characters. The exact number depends on the source, but it's generally in the range of 50,000 to 100,000. However, most people only learn a few thousand characters to be literate.
* Pinyin: While Chinese characters are the primary writing system, there's also pinyin, which uses Roman letters to phonetically represent the pronunciation of characters. Pinyin has 26 letters (the same as English), but it's just a pronunciation guide, not the actual written form of the language.
So, to answer your question, it's more accurate to say:
* There are thousands of Chinese characters.
* Pinyin uses 26 letters for pronunciation, but it's not the primary writing system.