The phonetic part indicates the original pronunciation, which may or may not be the modern pronunciation.įor example, let’s look at the character 饭 fàn, meaning “rice” or “meal.” The radical often suggests the meaning of a character. These are the technical terms for the components we just talked about. They consist of a radical and a phonetic element. Most of Chinese characters are pictophonetic. For all the possible combinations of sounds, you can visit the pinyin chart at ChineseClass101. Of course, each Chinese character can also have four possible tones, so that adds to the amount of individual sounds. There are only about four hundred different combinations of initials and finals in Chinese therefore there are many homophones. Pinyin cannot be read like English, even though it uses the Roman alphabet. Though pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, and some of the sounds are similar to their English counterparts, some of the letters and combinations of letters have pronunciations quite different from English. Nearly every Chinese syllable is spelled with one initial sound followed by one final sound. Unlike in European languages, initials and finals-not consonants and vowels-are the elements that make up a word in pinyin. Pinyin is a phonetic system used to teach standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, to spell Chinese names in foreign publications, and to enter Chinese characters on computers.
#Chinese letters how to#
There are no spaces between characters and the characters that make up compound words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you have to figure out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, and also which characters belong together. When written on the page, each character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is or how many strokes it contains. Elements That Make Up a Chinese WordĬhinese verbs and adjectives generally consist of one character (syllable) but nouns often consist of two, three, or more characters (syllables). This means that workable literacy in the Chinese language only requires knowledge of between three to four thousand characters. But the good news is that a large number of those are rarely-used variants, accumulated throughout history. The simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used.Ĭhinese is famed for its huge number of characters, and some dictionaries contain more than 50,000 words as entries. The simplified characters have a lot fewer strokes and certain parts of some characters were completely eliminated. Most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today were the result of simplifications made by the government of China in the 1950s and 60s. The traditional form of Chinese characters was widely used up until the mid-twentieth century. Characters were inscribed on bones and shells that were used for divination. The earliest recognizable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 B.C. Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the second millennium B.C. These simple characters also sometimes serve as the root of a more complex character, and are called “radicals.” Some of these simple characters and logical combinations within the character still remain clear enough to see what they depict. Then, logical combinations of the simple characters followed. The first Chinese characters were simple objects like “human”, “hand”, “foot”, “mountain”, “sun”, “moon”, and “tree”. Some of these smaller pictures within the character give a hint as to meaning and pronunciation (though not always).
Once you get the hang of them, they aren’t as difficult to remember as you may think.Īll characters are made up of smaller picture elements within the character. While Chinese characters are often thought of as extremely complex, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs that are assembled in different combinations.
Notice the structure of the Numbers in Chinese.Chinese Uses Written Characters That are Known as 漢字 ( hànzi) (The same as our number system 351 means 3 x 100 + 5 x 10 + 1, only we leave out the powers of ten.)
#Chinese letters plus#
三百五十一 sān bǎi wǔ shí yī three times hundred plus five times ten plus one. From this all numerals can be made, after 10, 100, 1000 or 10000 means de number has to be added, before it means you have to multiply the number it is standing before. ThereĪre words for the bigger numbers, 100, 1000, 10.000 etc. Upwards are formed by using the following pattern: for example 11 can be formedīy using 10 + 1 ( shi+yi). Unique and therefore need to be memorized individually.
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