Looking into the Chinese dictionary I have on my phone, I noticed that 我是 (I am) is listed as a word, while I as a non native speaker would consider this to be two separate words. Whether or not 我是 is listed as a word in dictionaries seems to be rather random since a few other dictionaries don't have it, but it got me thinking about the general state of words in Chinese. This is of course a heated debate even in languages with explicit spaces between their tokens, but I want to believe this is even a larger problem in languages such as Chinese.

I guess a few of my questions are:

* Do Chinese people generally agree upon how a sentence should be segmented into its compounds?
* Is a 词 different from a word in any sense?
* Do even native Chinese generally split characters into words (词), or is the concept of words something we have forced into Chinese because it makes sense in western languages?