@Russell_Sancto I do agree with you that it would be ideal if single characters that have no meaning when used alone were always flagged as such. This is definitely the main weakness of the Zhongwen extension mentioned above. I think the Pleco mobile app presents bound characters much more clearly, but then it isn’t trying to fit everything into hover text.
Having said that though, I would say that in most cases bound characters do tend to have had distinct meanings in ancient forms of Chinese, rather than only taking meaning from their usages in compound words.
So, I think a better analogy for definitions of single bound characters, is that it’s a little more like listing below the main definition for ‘telephone’, that ‘tele-’ is a prefix meaning ‘far away’ and ‘phone’ refers to the sound of a voice, and both of those derive from ancient Greek words that you don’t need to know and can’t use in English.
Knowing them isn’t harmful, as long as you understand that they’re bound syllables, though. They might actually be useful in helping you with understanding new words later, say when you see ‘telemedicine’ and ‘phonetics’ for the first time.
I’d say this goes doubly for a langage like Chinese where you can see that it’s definitely the same character and not coincidentally the same syllable, so there’s a high chance that it has the same linguistic root.
Although there can still be ambiguity over whether a character in a new word is the same as one you know elsewhere. Of course, loan words from other languages cause problems when the characters used are purely phonetic.
Also, in some cases the character simplification process has caused different characters with distinct meanings to be combined together into a single character like with 面. The measure word for surfaces isn’t meant to be ‘a noodles of’, in traditional characters flour/noodles is 麵, which has 面 on the right side because it’s pronounced the same as surface/plane/aspect (in ancient Chinese this character mean originally meant ‘face’). Personally I’d have preferred it if they’d simplified 麵 to something like 饣+ 面 (ie, added the radical for eating/food) - it’s not technically correct by the simplication rules, but it sure is better than arbitrarily combining it with another word.
Ideally a really useful definition list would omit irrelevant definitions when it knows it’s a presenting a loan word or that a particular character in the word is a simplified from a specific character meaning in this context - this is probably a bit much to ask for a simple definition panel though!