Understanding Chinese characters
Learning Chinese characters can be a struggle to begin with but once the basics have been mastered each new character can take you on a fascinating journey through Chinese history and culture. In the language section we have anintroduction to the Chinese language and also show how the charactersare drawn with brush or pen strokes. Here we look at the basic classes of characters and the origins of some of the most frequently used characters in Chinese.
Ancient scripts
The Chinese script is not the oldest known script. The Cuneiform script from about 5,500 years ago was used in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq and Iran) and was in use for about 3,000 years. Over 750,000 clay tablets using the cuneiform characters have been unearthed. The language was decoded in 1850 bySir Henry Rawlinson➚. In Egypt at around 5,000 years ago the famous hieroglyphic script developed; in this case the characters are pictograms but the script fell out of use by 500CE. In India the short-lived Harappa Culture (4,500-3,700BCE) also had an ancient script. The written script in China can only be traced back with certainty to theoracle bones of about 1,200BCE. However the script had a considerable vocabulary and signs of simplification at that date which strongly suggest the origin of the script goes back much further. It is likely that earlier writings were made on perishable material such as bamboo that have now all been lost. What makes Chinese unique is that the script forms have evolved directly to become the present day characters and so it is the longest lived script still in use in the world. As well as the oracle bone script, inscriptions became common on bronze ware from theShang andZhou dynasties. These inscriptions used the金文 Jīn wén script which is less informative than the oracle bones as it just records who owned and made the vessel - the longest inscription is just 42 characters long. Around 2,000 of these Jinwen characters are ancestors of modern day forms.
Chinese Calligraphy
The Chinese language is a treasure trove of history and traditions. The language script has been in use for over 4,000 years. Fine historic pieces by the great masters continue to achieve as high a price at auction as great paintings. To appreciate Chinese writing it is important to know how the characters are made with the brush.Read more…Chinese Character categories
The characters are split into groups. The first are the ancient pictographs, these characters are derived from drawings of objects in everyday life probably over 10,000 years ago. During the period 5,000 to 6,000 years ago the pictures were augmented with indirect and abstract symbols, this class is called the指事zhǐ shì ‘refer to things’.
Different kingdoms in the China area devised their own characters and it all became quite confusing. It was the discovery of writing onoracle bones from the lateShang dynasty (c. 1200BCE) that has greatly added to the knowledge of the characters used in ancient days. At this time the characters remained mainly pictorial, it was then and in the laterHan Dynasty that characters began to include components that indicate how they should be pronounced - the phonetic part. Up until then looking at a character gave no hint as to how to say it. Nowadays about 80% of characters have a phonetic part indicating how it might be pronounced, these are called the形声xíng shēng‘appear sound’ class of character. Over the centuries the spoken language has changed and recognizing the phonetic part is not a totally reliable guide to pronunciation. As well as phonetic components there are a relatively small number of ‘meaning’ or ‘determinative’ components; these radicals indicate that the character which uses it is in a particular class of thing - for example the木wood radical is used in over 1,500 characters all with an association with plants or wood and心heart radical is used in many characters indicating an emotion.
Since the Han dynasty (over 2,000 years ago) the core characters has remained pretty much unaltered but new characters are needed and archaic ones have fallen out of use. The classic script which came into use c. 400CE has been used for official documents ever since. The writing of officials and scholars was not used by everyday people and the term ‘Chinese Latin’ has been used to make the allusion to Europe when only the educated elite would use Latin not the vernacular language.
Over the centuries the original pictures have beensimplified for ease of writing with a brush. In the list of characters below on the left in brown is the original script ‘picture’ from theShang orZhou dynasties - 3,000 years ago. In blue is the modern script which uses lines and avoids curves as much as it can. These simplifications can make deciphering characters difficult.
Proverb
The story of how characters originated
One well known story is that the legendary god/emperorFuxi devised the characters from theEight Trigrams fromYin/Yang system and that the characters developed from these eight. There is neither logic nor evidence for this idea.
According to another tradition it wasCang Jie➚仓颉 who devised the characters at the time of theYellow Emperor. He observed the footprints of animals and birds and realized how just the shape of the print uniquely identified the animal. He could just draw the simple footprint shape rather than the whole animal. From this idea he applied the same principle to devising pictographs for many everyday objects (sun,moon,earth,clouds,birds,animals and so on). These characters (象形xiàng xíngimage shapes) have made their way into Japanese (Kanji➚) and Korean scripts (Hangul➚) too; so learning Chinese characters helps you read a little in Japan and Korea.
There is now a mind boggling set of 200,000 or so characters but fortunately, to get by in Chinese, you only need to master about 500 of them. The vast majority (90%) are made up of a ‘radical’ combined with another element rather than a single pictorial representation.Liu Xin➚ andXu Shen➚ of theHan Dynasty used six classes of character: pictographs; indirect symbols; associative compounds; mutually interpreted symbols; borrowed characters and determinative phonetics. Xu Shen produced the influential说文解字 Shuō wén jiě zì➚ in about 100CE where he identified 540 common components (mainly radicals).
Character forms
The form of the characters went through an evolution from the early oracle bones. The小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ script has curves and fine lines and was the standard form imposed by theQin dynasty. The forms are still used today on seals and other pieces of artwork. These replaced the early大篆 Dà zhuàn ‘large seal’ form that was used in theZhou dynasty principally on bronze work. The change in form was driven by using a brush rather than a stylus to inscribe them. In the latter part of the Zhou dynasty an unusual script became popular, this was the ‘Bird and insect script➚’ where characters were drawn as stylized birds and insects, it fizzled out when the Qin dynasty came to power.
It was during the following Han dynasty that the characters took the step of being square in form with straight strokes and not curves. The隶书 Lì shū ‘clerical script’ and楷书 kǎi shū ‘standard script’ had evolved during the Qin dynasty because they were faster to write with a brush than the older ‘seal’ forms. The regular ‘kaishu’ script has less variation of stroke than ‘lishu’; Lishu is more suited tocalligraphy. Writing individual strokes in this script with a brush is slow, and so for reason of speed and also artistry a different script is used. The common form of this running or cursive script is草书 cǎo shū ‘grass script’ but this can be challenging to read.
By theSong dynasty the printing of books became common. In a break to using a brush, the characters were engraved on wood with a knife. This made straight strokes easier to make than curves. It uses thin horizontal but thick vertical strokes. This宋体字 Sòng tǐ zì style of calligraphy is still commonly seen in books and fine art.
Picture characters
The character for aperson is a much simplified pictogram of a figure leaning to the left, the leftmost stroke originally represented the arm. Now it is only a pair of legs.
One of the clearest pictographs representsmountain. The original pictograph had two smaller humps with a centralmountain, these have been simplified to become vertical strokes over the years. This character is used in the names of two provincesShanxi山西 (mountains west) andShandong山东 (mountains east).
Asheep orgoat is recognizable from its horns. The modern character for asheep has two dot strokes for the horns, a stroke for the eyes and one for the mouth.
The pictogram for abird has it sitting on a perch with one eye represented by a dot. This is one of the more pleasing simplifications as it manages to retain the original essence of the subject with very few strokes.
The pictogram for afish shows a head and a scaly body completed with a line to represent the fins. Afish is used as a symbol wishing good luck as it sounds the same as the character余 yú for abundance and affluence.
In the modern character for anelephant the head is shown with the tusk and trunk protruding, so there are seven strokes in all to form the body. The elephant's head is drawn as an oblong. Several animals are captured as an easy to see pictogram in the same way including:horses,dogs andrabbits. Asian elephants used to be widespread in China, today they are only seen inYunnan province. A piece inChinese chess is called anelephant, and the game itself is calledXiangqi orelephant game.
The character for avehicle used to make sense in its old script form,車 it was a cart seen from above with an axle on either side. In the lastmajor simplification of the Chinese script brought in by the People's Republic the character has been simplified to the extent that the ‘cart’ is hard to make out.
Chinese Silk
Along with porcelain and tea,silk is one of China's important innovations. The secret of this great invention was closely guarded for centuries. Fabulous fine cloth was an important export as far back as the early Roman Empire and it was in Rome where a law was passed to ban the wearing of silk.Read more…Of fundamental interest to our ancestors was the passage of theseasons, and themoon determined thedate (from which we get the wordmonth). The Chinese character formoon is an idealized crescent moon.
The character for sun is simply a picture of a radiatingcircle. The ‘square’ form of all characters in this script forces the shape to be a box rather than a circle. In many cultures the sun is shown with an all seeing eye at its center, so the pictogram has a dot in the middle.
Another round pictogram ismouth which has become a plain square without any embellishment. As a radical component it is often used in characters relating to speech.
A straightforward character to memorize is agateway orentrance as it is just a doorway with two doors. As with ‘vehicle’ thetraditional form門 has recently beensimplified for quicker drawing but retains the basic shape of how you would draw a gateway.
The pictogram for aneye, is an eye on its side. The central iris of the eye has been reduced to two short strokes in the middle.
Afield is an ancient character. It is an area divided up for cultivation with cross-paths.
A word of universal importance, particularly ages ago when almost everybody worked the land, is the one forrain. It has little drops falling downwards from the sky.
Another pictogram that once it is visualized as a picture works well isheart. It has a simple shape, the dot (dian) strokes give an impression of blood in motion. You will seeheart in combination with many other characters denoting a strong emotion, for example热心 rè xīn is literallyhot heart meaningpassionate, enthusiastic.
Online Chinese Dictionary
Have a word or character to look-up? Use our free and extensive onlinedictionary.Read more…Abstract notions
Characters have to identify more than just physical objects, words are needed for more abstract notions like spatial relationships. The following is a selection of a few common characters where the drawing brings an abstract idea to life.
Your browser does not support this audio element.To give the concept ofup;above; orover what could be simpler than an upright character? It is used in the name for Shanghai (上海) to roughly meanon-sea.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Once you have chosen how to representup as a character thendown;below ordescend must be the mirror image of it.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Another abstract notion ismiddle orcenter and this is quickly brought to mind by a symmetric figure, originally representing an arrow hitting the center of a target or may be the central portion of a flag. Most significant is its use in theChinese word for China itself:中国zhōng guómiddle or center country.
Your browser does not support this audio element.The easiest of all the abstract words are the numbers: 1, 2 and 3. They follow the Arabic/Indian system of being based on a count of strokes. So1 is just one stroke.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Two: 2 must be two strokes.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Three: 3 follows the pattern with three strokes. You can think of Arabic 3 as three horizontal strokes linked together. Thereafter as in the Arabic system Chinese does not continue to add more strokes for 4; 5 etc..Seenumbers section for the full set.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Another abstract notion isopen space orvastness. The character consists of mainly open space, it used to have a character inside廣. This character may be familiar to you already as it is part of the name of the ‘vast’ provincesGuangxi:广西vast west andGuangdong:广东vast east.
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Feng Shui
The ancient tradition ofFeng Shui has been far reaching for thousands of years. It is still practiced today, particularly for choosing the site for buildings and graves. With the goal of harmony and balance with nature, it has excellent environmental credentials.Read more…When you have relative abstract terms likeup anddown; you also needbig andsmall.Big is just a bigperson人ren with an extra stroke suggesting out-stretched arms.
Your browser does not support this audio element.If you want to emphasize size even more so that it becomes excessively large, then just adding an extra stroke tobig大da makes ittoo orexcessive. The extra stroke was originally a line for emphasis but this has become adot.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Another adaption of thebig character is to add anotherheng line stroke at the top. This gives the concept ofheaven orsky - a very large space that is above men. The top stroke represented a large head to emphasize idea of 'top'.This is the secondtian we have used in this section.Tianheaven andTianfield are distinguished bytones in pinyin.Heaven isfirst tonetiān whilefield issecond tonetián.
Your browser does not support this audio element.The opposite tobig issmall and it is represented by an already small thing chopped in two.
Your browser does not support this audio element.Cutting up something already small makes it evenless. So another ‘cut’ stroke turnssmall (xiao) intoless (shao).Character combinations
Year of the ...
Most people are familiar with the twelve years and their animals. Chinese astrology is about the year of birth rather than the month of birth and so all people born in a particular year share some characteristics. Even to this day couples arrange birth of children to fall in 'lucky' years.Read more…Once you have a basic set of characters they can now be combined into composite characters in various ways. This class of characters is called the会意 huì yìassociative compounds. The way they are combined can become complicated as sometimes the original meaning has been lost and the combination of characters has no discernible logic.
If you combinemoon andsun you have the two brightest objects in the sky. So the combined character ofsun日 andmoon月 makes the character forbright明.
Combining the character forrain雨 with abroom gives another clear meaning - rain you need to brush away which issnow雪.
Other characters are formed by combination withrain雨. In this casefield田 andrain together makethunder雷. This has the evocative link of hearing an approaching storm out in the fields.
Thefield田 character can be combined with other characters. If it is added to strengthli力, itself a pictograph of a muscled arm, then the character formale is constructed, reflecting the traditional role of men as the muscled toilers in the fields.
Thefish鱼 character produces a number of related fishy meanings. If the radical forwatershui水 is added to it as three ‘drops’ then we get the action offishing. This is also a ‘phonetic’ clue asfish andfishing are both pronounced the same way.
A quality of bothfish andmeat is that they must be eaten when fresh as they go off quickly. So to convey the notion offreshness the characters forfishyu鱼 andsheepyang羊 are combined together.
Finally as an example of a more obscure but somehow delightful origin is the character forancient. It is a combination oftenshi十 andmouthkou口 perhaps indicating words passed between ten people, or passed down through ten generations making it very ancient indeed.
A set of ancient pictographs showing the different representations in ‘large seal’大篆 Dà zhuàn (over 2,000 years old) ;小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ (about 2,000 years old) and modern script. The first set are the picture based representations for bird, fish, sheep or goat, man, large and heaven. There is quite a lot of variation between ancient forms as it was never standardized.
Second set of ancient pictographs showing the different representations in ‘large seal’大篆 Dà zhuàn (over 2,000 years old) ;小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ (about 2,000 years old) and modern script. The second set are the picture based representations for small, middle, moon, sun, rain and mountain.
Phonetic Characters
Devising individual ‘pictures’ for hundreds of characters becomes unmanageable. Quite apart from the difficulty of making a rough representation, there is the problem of giving a guide on how to pronounce the character as a picture gives no clue. To get around this issue most Chinese characters use a radical that gives a hint to the pronunciation rather than the meaning. An example is the character forhorse马mǎ. The phonetic sound ‘ma’ can be found in other characters pronounced ‘ma’ such asmother妈mā andquestion mark吗mǎ.
Unfortunately over the years pronunciation in Chinese (as with all other languages) has changed and the phonetic part has become in some cases misleading. For example the character forwrap; cover包bāo does give the pronunciation for饱bǎo but for炮pào the ‘b’ has become a ‘p’. The phonetic characters represent about 80% of all characters.
Phonetic Borrowing
In a further twist of complexity there are characters that have ‘robbed’ other characters of their representations. When two characters were pronounced the same then they were often written down using the most common character that sounded the same - almost like a phonetic spelling. Over time a character was robbed of its old form and to make this unambiguous the old usage had a component added to distinguish the two meanings. As an example莫mò ‘do not’ has taken over the representation for sunset (a representation of the sun seen through trees). The character it robs from is now written as暮mù which still means ‘sunset; dusk’. They used to be both pronounced the same:mù. To distinguish them the character日rì ‘sun’ was added beneath莫. Looking at莫mò nowadays gives no clue as to why ‘do not’ has this pictographic representation.
Chinese Words
Imperial Examinations
One of China's most important exports was the respect for scholarship and learning. China was the first nation to appoint on basis of what they knew rather than who they knew. Strict examinations were set up two thousand years ago and were the passport to a quieter life with a steady income.Read more…There is only so far you can go with characters, they all need to be easy to recognize uniquely and have to be learned by heart. Basic literacy is considered to require learning 2,000 characters. This figure clearly indicates that characters are not ‘words’, there are hundreds of thousands of words in both English and Chinese. In Chinese a single character rarely establishes meaning, this is certainly true in spoken Chinese when hundreds of characters sound exactly the same. To give a clear meaning two or more characters are used together to form a word. Typically the characters reinforce each other in meaning, both separately refer to more or less the same thing and so dispel ambiguity. A classic example is朋友péng yǒu where both朋 and友 independently meanfriend but taken together they unambiguously meanfriend. In my modest dictionary there are 15 homophones for朋péng including膨swollen;棚shed;鬅disheveled and篷sail; while友yǒu has 13 homophones including:懮relaxed;牖lattice window;黝dark green and泑ceramic glaze. Hearingpéng yǒu immediately identifies the meaning asfriend.
Cantonese Language
The Cantonese language or 'Yue' language is still spoken by over 50 million people in Southern China (Guangdong, Guangxi,Hong Kong andMacau). Although the written form is very similar toMandarin the spoken language is very different.Read more…Putting characters together forms a composite ‘word’ idea.笑话 xiào huàjoke is made up of笑 xiàolaugh; smile and话 huàspeech; words. There are many examples of this, where the combination conveys a more precise meaning than the individual parts.
It is also quite common for two characters together to have a meaning quite separate from the component characters, rather like the case of some components within a single character described above. For example东dōng 'east' and西xī 'west' in combination means literallyeast and west but also the more generalthing, stuff东西dōng xī. Another example is雪恨xuě hènavenge which is made up of雪snow and恨hate or尘世 while chén shìmundane life is made up of尘dust, dirt and世age, era, life and finally歪风wāi fēngunhealthy trend, bad influence made up of歪crooked and风wind.
Vocabulary
We have somesimple introductory lessons to basic Chinese where you can see the characters in use.
Er Ya - the world's first Thesaurus
The ‘Er Ya’ must be considered the oldest Thesaurus in the world. It is over 2,000 years old and still broadly understandable today. It is usually described as a dictionary but because characters are arranged by their meaning it is more like a modern Thesaurus (or synonymicon) than a dictionary.尔雅 Ěr yǎ can be roughly translated as ‘Towards Correctness’.
It consists of 19 chapters on a variety of subjects including:music,architecture,plants, farm animals, relationships andmountains. It was probably written by senior members of theTaixue (top academy) in theWestern Han dynasty to help students of theConfucian classics to understand the written texts. It used to be attributed to Confucius himself and some sections may date back as early as the 6th century BCE. Over the following centuries various commentaries and appendices were added.
Most of the sections consist of a list of characters in the same category followed by more general sayings and related information. As the text is so old and so laconic it is very hard to translate, many of the characters for things have been superseded, and so no complete, modern translation has been possible.Here is an extract from chapter 3 about terms relating to kinship, it is one of easiest chapters to understand. It has 49 lines here are the first four.
父为考，母为妣 fù wéi kǎo; mǔ wéi bǐFather becomes考 deceased father; Mother becomes妣 deceased mother.
父之考为王父，父之妣为王母 fù zhī kǎo wéi wángfù; fù zhī bǐ wéi wáng mǔ
Father's deceased father is known as王父 ‘grandfather’; father's deceased mother is known as王母 ‘grandmother’.
王父之考为曾祖王父，王父之妣为曾祖王母 wáng fù zhī kǎo wéi zēng zǔwáng fù; wáng fù zhī bǐ wéi zēng zǔ wáng mǔ
Grandfather's deceased father is known as曾祖 ‘great-grandfather’ ; Grandfather's deceased mother is known as曾祖 ‘great-grandmother’.
曾祖王父之考为高祖王父;曾祖王父之妣为高祖王母 zēng zǔ wáng fù zhī kǎo wéi gāo zǔ wáng fù?zēng zǔ wáng fù zhī bǐ wéi gāo zǔ wáng mǔ
Great-grandfather (grandfather)'s deceased father is known as高祖 grandfather; Great-grandfather (grandfather)'s deceased mother is known as高祖 grandmother.
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