Sequoyah met many white people. He was fascinated by their "talking leaves," which was their writing system on paper. He wanted to make an alphabet for Cherokees to communicate too. He began making it around 1809. First he tried to make a symbol for every word, like in Chinese. That required too much remembering. Then he tried to make one for every idea, but gave up. Finally he made one symbol for every syllable in the Cherokee language. He made a syllabary with 86 letters. Many of the letters look like English because he had an English book that he could not read.