Insofar, we were mostly dealing with the languages that have an alphabet, where each symbol represents a letter —tiniest elements we combine with each other to create words— and each letter is endowed with some sound, whether a consonant or a vowel one. On the way, we also met abjad and abugida: for these two, vowels were either inherited in a "consonant" character or added in some position around it in a form of a special marker.
Chinese language uses something entirely different for its writing system. What can that be?
Well, I bet you saw Chinese characters before. The trick is that a chart of certain amount of symbols that you could memorize and combine does not exist for the Chinese language. There are over 50,000 (!!!) characters in the language, although an educated Chinese person will know only about 8,000 of them.
In any case, techniques used to learn, say, French or even Hebrew are not going to work here for obvious reasons.
How do they do it then? How one who wants to learn Chinese can accomplish such a goal?
For starters, to read a Chinese newspaper you'll need to learn only about 2,000-3,000 characters. Another good news: characters represent syllables —each one has an initial sound and a final sound, topped off by a tone. So you kind of learn consonant and vowel sounds altogether (well, with 3,000 of them, I'd better!).
Normally, a Chinese character (or 汉字, hàn zì) can be "decomposed" into smaller parts, say, building blocks, called radicals. This list is waaay shorter: there are just 214 of them —right, still more than any alphabet but, admit it, doable. Using those radicals you can build and, in majority of cases, even guess-timate the meaning of a given Chinese word.
Example, please. Say, I know the radical for "person" —人 (rén). Now, if I combine it with the radical for "enclosure" 囗 (wéi) like this: 囚 (tù) —I can actually guess the meaning of it using some simple logic. So, "enclosed person" = "prisoner"! Does knowing how to pronounce the featured radicals help to deduce the pronunciation of the final character made by them? It does sometimes. Not in this particular case, though.
What it means for you is that learning the Chinese language is going to become a great memory challenge. It is not 100% logical like in the mentioned above example but every time it is, use it to your advantage, other times —"Memorize. Repeat."
Some online dictionaries even decompose into radicals any given Chinese character, like this one. Talking about dictionaries, the great majority of them is organized by radicals: : characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer strokes (lines) come before radicals containing more strokes. Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well, for instance, alphabetically according to their pinyin spelling.
How do you retain 214 absolutely different radicals? Repetition! And, of course, there are always mnemonics, i.e. ways to help you remember the Chinese radicals (in this case). Check this one out:
Since Chinese doesn't use letters, what are those oddly-looking characters called? The proper name is logogram (or logograph, either is correct). Which gives the name to the whole writing system of Chinese: logographic writing system. Not an alphabet, not an abugida, not an abjad.
A logogram is a symbol that represents a word or part of a word. You know it, some Egyptian hieroglyphs are logograms; signs like & and @ are logograms —you know how to pronounce them and you know how to write them. Same with Chinese. Only with 3,000 symbols (oops!).
All Chinese characters are logograms, but some may also be called pictograms or ideograms depending on how they were formed. If a Chinese character is a picture of an object, like a tree 木 (mù) —see, it looks literally like a sketch of a tree— it's called a "pictograph" (the case for around 4% of Chinese words). One remark, though, they are not strictly pictures, they could be ages ago but not anymore. It's their "origin story" that gives them that picto- part. If a Chinese character is a representation of some abstract idea, like "calm" 安 (ān), it's called an "ideograph", which means "idea picture".
Those are nuances, I only put it here for you to remember the most important piece of information: all Chinese characters are logograms. Not letters.
All Chinese characters are written in a standardised manner using strokes which are also standardised. Just keep it in mind: strokes aren't random. Each stroke follows certain rules of how it should be written. Rules are also in place to establish the order of the strokes, it is not up to your mood or stars (just saying). These are the rules:
- LEFT TO RIGHT: Write from left to right.
- TOP TO BOTTOM: Write from top to bottom.
- Write horizontals before verticals.
- Write left falling before right falling.
- Write from outside frame to inside strokes.
- Write major middle stroke before the two sides.
- Finish what is inside the box before closing it.
Many online dictionaries nowadays come with a function where the right stroke order is shown. This one, for example. It simplifies matters, though doesn't free you from an effort of memorizing it ('coz you can't go to the dictionary for every single character every single time). Still, helpful!
There are 8 basic types of strokes. To illustrate all of them, usually the Chinese character 永 (yǒng), meaning "forever" or "permanence", is used.
As to Chinese texts, they can be written from right to left in vertical columns, left to right in horizontal lines, or occasionally right to left in horizontal lines. In Taiwan it is often written vertically, while in China and Singapore it is usually written horizontally.
Yet, there is one more curious question left to answer about the Chinese characters: Are there any rules or guidelines on how to read Chinese characters?
Most of the characters follow this formula (again, not a 100% rule but 80-90%):
A component that indicates the rough area of meaning + a component that gives a clue about the pronunciation of the character. Such characters, a majority for Chinese, are called pictophonetics.
Here is an example: 钱 (qián) means "money". The left hand side of the character 钅(jīn) means "gold". This one is the meaning component of the word. The right hand side of the character 戋 (jiān) gives a clue as to how the whole character is pronounced (both qián and jiān share the same "ian" sound).
Let's reiterate that the pronunciation clue component of a character usually does not have precisely the same pronunciation as the whole character, or it may be the same sound, but pronounced in a different tone. Hence, it is only a clue. It does NOT tell you exactly how the character is pronounced. And sometimes it is not possible to guess the pronunciation at all.
If you are interested to learn more about this peculiarity of the Chinese characters, feel free to check out this great article with more examples and info as to why this method sometimes works and sometimes doesn't and how to spot each of the two components.
A huge part of correct pronunciation in Chinese is one's ability to master its tones. There are 4 of them in Mandarin Chinese (+ a neutral one), although in other dialects you can find that the quantity of said tones varies from 2 to 12. Tones aren't intonation, the way you may use it in English. They are pitch changes and every single syllable has one. And of course, if you say a wrong tone, the meaning of a word may change or turn into nonsense.
We talked about tones at length in the previous Episode but just to reinforce, here are some examples.
Curious what it sounds like? Play with Mandarin tones here.
So in this table above with examples for tones, Chinese words are spelled the way you can at least try to pronounce them (well, you and a whole bunch of people who know Latin script) —not with some logograms which not you or me can begin to imagine how to say out loud. This is not just me trying to help you out. Please, meet 拼音 pīnyīn (literally "spell sound"), or in other words the Romanization of the Chinese characters based on their pronunciation.
Pinyin has pretty much intuitive way of putting Chinese sounds into letters you are more used to see. I bet you could read the words in the table or at least get an idea what they are pronounced like.
As mentioned earlier, all Chinese characters have an initial sound and a final sound, and a tone. To use pinyin, you should get familiar with those initials and finals, because not all of them are what they seem. Say, the letter q is pronounced like "ch" in cheap. Or letter x is closer to the sound "sh" in she. And so on.
It will take 10 minutes to learn pinyin but it will save tons and tons of time on one's way to correct Chinese pronunciation. Just remember, pinyin is a study aid, not a goal. It is there to help you move forward, not to replace the Chinese characters and handicap your ability to read them. Use it wisely.
Here is a great source to start on pinyin: to listen and get to know this system closer.
When it comes to typing in Chinese, the technology takes us on a completely different ride. You see, in this era you don't have to remember precisely all the characters in a Chinese word to type it. Even better yet, it may be just enough to know how to pronounce a word and how it approximately looks like. Start writing the desired word in pinyin —technology gives you the rest. Let me demonstrate with this video (5:32):
Say, this online dictionary can help you out to do the trick described.
Although, there is a downside with such technological solutions —over time one most certainly loses their skill to spell Chinese words without the software. And it doesn't only concern us, learners, but the natives as well. If you ever wondered whether the Chinese people have troubles remembering all the characters and writing in Chinese, this video made on the streets of Shanghai might just give you an idea (9:21):
Not-so-simple-to-put-on-paper characters and crazy amount of them makes you wonder: How does one write in Chinese with speed? I mean, think lecture in a university or just some situation where you are to jot down something really fast. How do you do it in Chinese?
Turns out, you just join some strokes together making it faster to write. Say, character for the last name Zhào: 趙 — quite a bunch of lines, isn't it? See how by joining some lines together with a gentle flick of your wrist you can transform this character into something easier to write:
And then there are also two ways to write in Chinese: Traditional (with all the strokes) and Simplified (with less strokes). Simplified Chinese characters were introduced in the beginning of 1950s to promote literacy.
Close to 2,000 Chinese characters were altered from their traditional form in the belief that the new ones would be easier to read and write.
Some of these characters are quite different from their traditional counterparts (which are still used in Taiwan, btw). The underlying principals of character writing, however, remain the same, and the same types of strokes are used in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters.
As for the example used here, the Simplified version versus the Traditional one will look like this:
So on paper it is going to be even faster to "doodle".
By the way, if we want to quantify the difference in the two versions in general, on average there are 13 strokes in most Chinese characters written in Traditional way, and 9 strokes if written in Simplified manner. You can read all about it in this article if needed.
Our Episode grew large enough already to go into details. And for the introduction with Chinese writing system and writing techniques it is more than enough.
Now it is time to gather some exciting intel on Chinese words. What can be more fun than a catchy song? It is your a special treat for the next Episode.
再见！Zài jiàn! (Goodbye!)
"Thànk yoǔ fōr réadìng mě! Līke mě, tōo!"
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