Understanding Chinese Characters

Chinese writing is much different than our western writing because it is comprised of Chinese symbols and Chinese characters which when put together make up the Chinese language. Understanding Chinese Characters can take quite some time to master.

Most linguists agree that Chinese writing dates back to the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC. Interestingly there appears to be no evidence that would suggest the Chinese characters and symbols that have always made up Chinese writing have any other origins other than Chinese.

The written Chinese characters are called hanzi and each character has meaning and represents a syllable of the spoken language. In the early Chinese language these characters were made up of pictures of people and animals. However, over the centuries these characters became more stylized thus the Chinese characters of today bear little resemblance to ancient Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese writing joins two or more characters together to form one character and there is no limit to the number of characters that can be combined because Chinese writing is open ended.

Over 50,000 characters and symbols encompassed the earliest forms of Chinese writing but today most of the ancient Chinese symbols are used by only scholars.

To learn basic modern Chinese you will need to learn around 3000 characters. This will be enough to read most of a Chinese newspaper. If you want to be able to read more technical writings, literature, or Chinese scripts you will need to learn around 6000 characters.

Chinese writing with its combination of Chinese characters and Chinese symbols resembles more of an art form than it does a language The continuous flow of the characters and symbols makes quite an artistic impression for the human eye.

Because Chinese writing is made of characters that continuously flow it looks more like art than a written language. It makes quite an artistic impression to the human eye.

Strokes are also very important to Chinese writing and each character will be comprised of anywhere from 1 to 64 stokes that are always written in the same direction. These strokes are very structured and the form of a character is never deviated from.

No matter how many strokes the character contains each Chinese character is written in exactly the same amount of space and there are never spaces between the characters. Because words with multi-syllables are never grouped together it makes it more difficult to learn to read Chinese. You need to first work out what each character means, then you need to determine how you pronounce it, and finally you need to figure out which characters actually belong together.

Just as we have verbs and adjectives so does the Chinese language with each made up of a one syllable character. Nouns can have two or more syllable characters.

Learning the Chinese characters and thus learning to read and write Chinese is a remarkable accomplishment. This is not an easy task! But it is by far one of the most rewarding languages to learn!

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