Chinese characters

If you want to learn more about how the written Chinese language works, online I found an interesting attempt at doing just that by imagining what English would be like with a character based writing system.

It shows how there is more or less an organized system to the thousands of Chinese characters. Very few characters are pictographs that actually look like the word they represent. Instead, the vast majority of characters consist of several parts, including a radical that places it in a semantic category. Another part in most characters provides phonetic information that tells you how it’s pronounced, although pronunciation has changed over thousands of years so sometimes it’s similar and sometimes it’s way off.

For example, characters for many geographical words have the radical for mountain 山。And additional characters are made using mountain as a radical, so they are all found in a dictionary (the kinds of dictionaries organized by radicals) under the 山 “shan” section, which is in the section of radicals with three strokes (山 is written with three strokes I + L + I). Some examples of characters with radical and phonetic parts are 峰 : 山 “shan” + 丰 “feng” = 峰 “feng” which means a peak or summit and can also be used to represent an apex or a camel’s hump. 夹 “jia”, which means wedged or placed in between, together with the mountain radical becomes 峡 “xia”, which means a gorge. The semantic meaning makes sense from the two parts and 夹 “jia” also serves as a phoneme (it’s similar to “xia”, an example of how its often close but not exactly the same).

Other characters put two together to make a logical new word. For example, a bird 鸟 “niao” on top of a mountain 山 becomes 岛 “dao”, which means island and is similar in pronunciation to “niao”. The meaning makes sense as islands are small mountains with birds flying overhead. 山 can also be used as a phonetic part in other characters, as in the character 仙, which is the radical for person 人 with 山 to become 仙 “xian” (some characters like 人 are altered slightly when they are written as a radical). 仙 means immortal and is similar to “shan” in pronunciation (close again, but not perfect).

There are plenty of more examples at online dictionaries such as http://www.zhongwen.com/ (click on radical under the dictionary section) and don’t miss this site about Chinese characters found on tattoos and in western advertisements, often with unintended mistakes and mistranslations.

Learning to read and write is a lot of work at first because you have to start from scratch and learn many symbols that are more complicated than the letters in the English alphabet. But once you know a few hundred, which really isn’t too difficult, you begin to see many connections between them, while many new words are simply combinations of two or three characters, e.g. vehicle is 车, car is 汽车(steam + vehicle), train is 火车 (fire + vehicle), bicycle is 自行车 (self + travel + vehicle), garage is 车库 (vehicle + warehouse), etc. Notice how the English spellings of those words have no connection whatsoever. Each character is a unit that can have several meanings and often many more when used in compound words. At that point, your grasp of the written language really accelerates and it becomes a lot more interesting and rewarding to study.