![]() If strokes were written in a random order, they would be much harder to remember. Our brain is able to automatically remember a complex sequence of movement. It is important because of how muscle memory works. ![]() Kids learn which stroke goes before which at school. By only naming the strokes, I can describe any character. In a way, strokes are closer to the concept of letters than characters are. They are the smallest unit of Chinese writing. There are 6 basic strokes.Some of them have several variants, and strokes can be combined to create more strokes. But the basic idea is that most characters are made from a small number of strokes. They are instructed to pay careful attention to the proportions and position of the characters inside the virtual square.Ī character is not a random drawing. Chinese kids, when they practice writing, use grid paper. A Chinese text is like a grid of characters. So they all have roughly the same size, and they can really be assembled like bricks. The Make-up of Chinese CharactersĬharacters are drawn inside an invisible square that marks its borders. Let’s take a look at what is inside a character. So far we have looked at Chinese characters from the outside. Like Lego bricks, you can de-construct words and re-assemble them more flexibly. The meaning of words seems more transparent than in English. The last part I interpret as something like: “the mainstream idea of shared production”, in other words, communism. You can split it in 4: 共 (gòng) + 产 (chǎn) + 主 (zhǔ) + 义 (yì): shared + production + main + meaning. You can split it in 2: 共产 (gòng chǎn) + 主义 (zhǔ yì): communist + ideology. You can take it as a whole word, which means “communism”. It’s interesting because you can analyze it at multiple levels. Here is a word I found interesting when I studied Chinese: Instead, words are made by composing characters like you would compose Lego bricks. In Chinese, there is no conjugation, and the morphemes never blend in with their surrounding. In addition, there are grammar rules like conjugation that further transform words so that their morphemes are not quite visible. There are many words in English for which it is hard to find the morphemes, because they blend together. For example “ day” becomes “ dai” in the word “ daily”. The word “ morph eme” is an indication of this phenomenon. And that’s an important difference with English morphemes.Īnother difference is that English morphemes change to fit the words they contribute to. So, Chinese characters are in a way, like small abstract pictures. The first meaning of 天 ( tiān) is “sky” and by extension “day”. I see it this way, because that’s how it has been explained to me, and with a bit of imagination, it makes sense. When I see 天 ( tiān), I see a small icon which represents a person extending his arms under the sky. Now there are a few differences between Chinese characters and English morphemes (a morpheme is what those parts like yester, day, un, expect, ed would be called by a linguist). I hope this gives you a sense of what Chinese characters are and how they differ from words and letters. This is to show that yester and 昨 ( zuó) carry a meaning of their own, even if they are not words. You can guess what I mean with this word, and a Chinese person would probably guess what I mean too, even if those words don’t actually exist. Now, let’s invent a word in English and Chinese at the same time: But it is sufficiently unique to give the whole word its meaning. Īs in English, the second character 天 ( tiān), means day, and as in English, the first one is not a word if taken alone. Let’s imagine we can split it in English the same way: +. We have 2 characters here: 昨 ( zuó) + 天 ( tiān). Let’s take an actual Chinese word as example and see how this works: ![]() The word “unexpected” would then be a 3-character word. In Chinese, UN would be a character, EXPECT would be another, and ED would be yet another. Let’s split it into smaller units of meaning: -.Ĭhinese characters are like those 3 parts. Here is one way to look at it: take the English word “unexpected” for example. Related: Why There Is No Chinese Alphabet What exactly is a Chinese character? That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. ![]() The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. It is actually impossible to count them all precisely. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. Letters don’t have any meaning by themselves.Ī Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. They spell out how words should be pronounced. An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet. Variations of the post below were first published at and on Quora by the same author. ![]()
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