Chinese is one of the oldest writing systems still in use, the earliest known form of Chinese writing were a well-developed character system carved on turtle shells, animal bones or bronzes. Later, this character system slowly evolved from a highly pictorial form into line form, and from different variants into a standardized and unified characters that we see today. The evolution of such can be attributed to those who were seeking to create a convenient form of written characters for daily usage throughout the ancient empire thousands of years ago.
Pictograms and ideograms are the two earliest types of Chinese characters used since more than three thousand years ago. However, these two types of characters lack of precision in the terminology for new inventions and discoveries due to the civilization development. Associative and pictophonetic compounds were then invented with the combination of two or more pictograms or ideograms from the existing system as the supplementary, which improved the terminology accuracy.
Only a very small proportion of Chinese characters are pictograms, but it makes up the basis of other Chinese characters.
Pictograms mainly used to represent specific things that are tangible. Therefore, we need ideograms for those abstract concepts, this small category has indicative characters that are direct iconic symbols.
Combination of two or more pictogram or ideogram characters construct associative compounds, it suggests a new meaning based on the original meaning from each character.
Some Chinese characters compose of two parts, one part indicates the character pronunciation, which is a phonetic radical; and the other part indicates the meaning of the character, which is a meaning radical.
Ocean yáng |
The chart below shows that this is by far the largest group.
Chinese characters are square-shaped characters. It looks very complicated if you treat each Chinese character as a whole, it will be very difficult to read, write and remember. In fact, Chinese characters' composition has its regular pattern. It becomes easy to remember if you divide it to different character-components, where each part is a relatively small unit.
Character-components are structural unit that forms Chinese characters, they are either a complete character by itself such as pictograms and ideograms, or as part of the complete character such as associative compounds and pictophonetic compounds.
Chinese characters consist of 801 character-components, there are 330 among them are commonly used, and about 70% of them or 226 have fixed meaning. Each character-component can be used independently with another or more components to form a character.
Learning character-components helps to avoid writing errors, missing or misplaced strokes, and more importantly understand Chinese characters faster and more accurately. It is a very effective way to memorize Chinese characters by recognizing the components, because Chinese words are mostly made up of a combination of some common characters, therefore the more you learn Chinese characters, the easier it becomes.
Many components of Chinese characters derive from pictograms and ideograms that are single-component characters. They also have fixed pronunciation, form and meaning. Thus, learning single-component characters becomes very important.
Most of the Chinese characters have two to three components, there are nearly 70% of the components have fixed name and meaning.
In order to split into different components, it is necessary to understand the structure of Chinese characters. That means, if you understood the structure of Chinese characters, you can easily split them into components. The following classifies all the structures:
Chinese characters are symbol system used to write Chinese, they are constructed by various types of strokes combined. Stroke is the smallest structural unit of the Chinese characters, which includes basic strokes and compound strokes.
Basic strokes can be further subdivided into simple strokes and combining strokes. Unlike simple strokes, which are independent, combining strokes only appears when they are part of the compound strokes.
Horizontal (héng) |
Leftward (piě) |
Dot (diǎn) |
---|---|---|
Vertical (shù) |
Rightward (nà) |
Tick (tí) |
Fold (zhé) | Hook (gōu) | Curve (wān) | Slant (xié) |
---|---|---|---|
Compound strokes are two or more basic strokes combined. Below are some examples:
This is just a guideline to help anyone to ease the pain on learning how to write and recognize Chinese characters. There are however some exceptional cases that conflict with the rules as shown below. Therefore, the main purpose of understand it is to learn how to write the characters, because it is the most rewarding practice to help remember and recognize Chinese characters.
As described earlier, there are regular patterns to form Chinese characters. Most characters such as associative compounds and pictophonetic compounds formed by two or more pictograms or ideograms. Therefore, we can break them into various components based on how they are structured, this helps to memorize the character based on the meaning and pronunciation from each part.
It is easy to learn a series of similar characters based on two aspects. One is on the pictographic radicals, which is to understand and memorize the characters based on same symbol. Another is on the phonetic radicals that are similar in pronunciation.
Woman radical | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
tā | mèi | jiě | mā | pó |
She | Younger sister |
Elder sister |
Mother | Grandma |
Water radical | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
hé | hǎi | yáng | fú | liú |
River | Sea | Ocean | Float | Flow |
Phonetic ma | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
mǎ | mā | má | mǎ | mà |
Horse | Mother | Ant | Yard | Scold |
Phonetic yang | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
yáng | yáng | yǎng | yǎng | yàng |
Goat | Ocean | Itch | Oxygen | Kind |
There are many Chinese characters that lookalike, but the meaning and pronunciation has big differences. Group these characters together and spot the subtle differences, then you can understand and remember the meaning and pronunciation of these characters effectively based on the differences.
rén | rù | bā |
People | Enter | Eight |
All of the three characters above have two strokes, which are piě (leftward) and nà (rightward), but the strokes have different lenghts and are connected differently.
dà | tài | tiān |
Big | Overly | Sky |
Character dà looked like a person with open arms, character tài and tiān add a diǎn (dot) and a héng (horizontal) respectively on top the character dà, these give you two different meanings. By grouping them together, we can learn all these characters easily using the compare-and-contrast method.