Chinese Writing

The Chinese writing system is not alphabetic, but is instead based on characters. Each character is composed of a number of basic strokes (Flash version) basic strokes (regular version) which must be written in the correct order How do I know how a Chinese character is pronounced? There are no direct clues as to how each character should be pronounced. Learning to read and write Chinese can therefore be quite a lengthy process, since a knowledge of several thousand characters is needed to read a newspaper. So where can I find the Chinese Alphabet? There isn't one - if you mean a set of basic Chinese symbols that are used to spell words. But there is pinyin - the official romanization system. Most people who learn Chinese start by learning pronunciation - these days Pinyin is the most commonly used tool. Should I learn Simplified or Traditional Characters? The serious student who is interested in reading literary or academic works written in Chinese must also learn two forms of the written language. One system is the traditional one used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and most overseas Chinese communities. The other is the simplified system now officially used in China, which came into being after the 1949 Communist Revolution and was promoted as a way of increasing literacy among the uneducated masses. But there is a certain degree of overlap between the two systems. Anyone who has learned traditional characters should not have too many problems learning simplified characters (and vice versa). Here is an example of the two systems. Are Chinese Characters Ideographic/Pictographic? A common misconception about Chinese characters is that they are based on pictures of the objects or ideas they represent. A small number of characters are in fact descended from pictures (such as the characters for sun , moon, tree, etc). However, the concrete origins of the modern versions of these so-called pictographs are usually difficult to detect. If nobody had told you that this character was originally a picture of the moon, you probably wouldn't have guessed! Besides, by itself this character means month. Moon is usually written with two characters:

Are there any easy ways to learn Chinese characters? Some learners find that breaking characters up into their various components, as in our Radical Tutorial, or in our online Flash file or stand-alone Flash application helps to learn them. Most characters are based on the principle of radical + phonetic. The radical, or semantic component, is often found on the left hand side. It gives a rough indication of the meaning. The phonetic, or sound component, gives a pronunciation clue. These two characters have common components. The character on the left serves as a sound indicator in the one on the right. The "grey box" is the radical. They are both pronounced ma - although with different tones. How useful is this knowledge to the learner? As this practice has been around for at least two thousand years and many characters have changed their pronunciation and meaning quite drastically, a knowledge of radicals and phonetics can rarely serve as anything but a rough guide. Still, it is often helpful to the learner to know that there is a system at work in the composition of the characters. Is Chinese a "Monosyllabic Language"? Another misunderstanding about Chinese characters is that they represent words. Since a character is generally equivalent to a syllable, it is widely held that Chinese is a monosyllabic language. That is, that each syllable in Chinese is a separate word. Although each character has a meaning, this is not the same as saying each character is a word. It is more accurate to say that each character is a morpheme. A morpheme is a linguistic term to refer to the smallest meaningful unit in a language. For example, in English, we can say that -s, is a morpheme, since it carries the meaning of plural. More examples can be found in the various suffixes originating from Latin and Greek, e.g. -ion, -ize, pro-, in-, re-, etc. Imagine what English would be like if it had never been influenced by outside languages like Latin and Greek. We would have to use a combination of native English words to express these ideas. So, although in classical written Chinese, characters are very often equivalent to words, in the modern, colloquial language, there is a greater tendency for words to be polysyllabic.