Effective Chinese Characters Tutorial

Effective Chinese Characters Tutorial

Introduction

Chinese is one of the oldest writing systems still in use, the earliest known form of Chinese writing were a well-developed character system carved on turtle shells, animal bones or bronzes. Later, this character system slowly evolved from a highly pictorial form into line form, and from different variants into a standardized and unified characters that we see today. The evolution of such can be attributed to those who were seeking to create a convenient form of written characters for daily usage throughout the ancient empire thousands of years ago.

Horse
mǎ

This is the Chinese character evolution for horse. As you can see, the pictogram progressively lost their pictorial flavour during the evolution. The first character shows an animal that has a head, a big eye, mane, limbs, heels and tail. Later, the head and mane combined to form the top half of the character, the limbs, heels and tail combined to form the rest, which evolved further to dots and a curved hook. The last is the simplified Chinese we see today.

Pictograms and ideograms are the two earliest types of Chinese characters used since more than three thousand years ago. However, these two types of characters lack of precision in the terminology for new inventions and discoveries due to the civilization development. Associative and pictophonetic compounds were then invented with the combination of two or more pictograms or ideograms from the existing system as the supplementary, which improved the terminology accuracy.

Woman
nǚ

Mother
mā

This pictogram depicted a woman who is kneeling down to sit back on her heels with both hands overlapped in front of a plump chest. Notice that later development changed the character drastically. Combine the two pictograms of woman and horse to form a pictophonetic compound that means mother, which refers to a woman where the character has a pronunciation similar to the Chinese character of horse.

Pictograms

Only a very small proportion of Chinese characters are pictograms, but it makes up the basis of other Chinese characters.

People
rén

A character that shows a polite bow illustrates a person, since politeness is a behaviour that is only for human being. In the ancient times people also bending forward to work such as farmers transplanting while working in a paddy field.

		Eye mù
		Goat yáng

These two characters are intuitive. In Chinese, yáng is a generic term that refers to many species in caprinae such as goats and sheep.

Ideograms

Pictograms mainly used to represent specific things that are tangible. Therefore, we need ideograms for those abstract concepts, this small category has indicative characters that are direct iconic symbols.

	One yī			Two èr			Three sān
	Above shàng			Below xià			Middle zhōng

	One yī		Above shàng
	Two èr		Below xià
	Three sān		Middle zhōng

A suitable number of strokes indicate some low numerals. Line is used as a measurement to represent position by an iconic indication.

Associative compounds

Combination of two or more pictogram or ideogram characters construct associative compounds, it suggests a new meaning based on the original meaning from each character.

Hand
shǒu

Look
kàn

The character shǒu resembles five fingers when you stretch out a hand. If you put it above both your eyes, it is a typical looking gesture. Unlike the pictophonetic compounds, the associative compound pronunciation neither same to any of the two characters.

Water
shuǐ

Teardrop
lèi

The line and dashes of the character shuǐ looks like water stream and splash. It is written as when the radical is situated on the left of a compound character, such as combine with character mù to represent teardrop.

Pictophonetic compounds

Some Chinese characters compose of two parts, one part indicates the character pronunciation, which is a phonetic radical; and the other part indicates the meaning of the character, which is a meaning radical.

Ocean
yáng

Combine the water radical with character yáng, which is related to water and pronounce similar to the Chinese character of goat.

The chart below shows that this is by far the largest group.

Components and structure

Chinese characters are square-shaped characters. It looks very complicated if you treat each Chinese character as a whole, it will be very difficult to read, write and remember. In fact, Chinese characters' composition has its regular pattern. It becomes easy to remember if you divide it to different character-components, where each part is a relatively small unit.

Character-components are structural unit that forms Chinese characters, they are either a complete character by itself such as pictograms and ideograms, or as part of the complete character such as associative compounds and pictophonetic compounds.

Chinese characters consist of 801 character-components, there are 330 among them are commonly used, and about 70% of them or 226 have fixed meaning. Each character-component can be used independently with another or more components to form a character.

Learning character-components helps to avoid writing errors, missing or misplaced strokes, and more importantly understand Chinese characters faster and more accurately. It is a very effective way to memorize Chinese characters by recognizing the components, because Chinese words are mostly made up of a combination of some common characters, therefore the more you learn Chinese characters, the easier it becomes.

	Follow cóng
	Crowd zhòng

Combine two rén together that looks like a person follows behind another person, add a third person then we have a crowd. Character rén is a pictogram, but it can also be a character-component for other characters. In this case, it helps to recognize three different characters by knowing only a single character-component.

Single-component characters

Many components of Chinese characters derive from pictograms and ideograms that are single-component characters. They also have fixed pronunciation, form and meaning. Thus, learning single-component characters becomes very important.

Single component

Multi-component characters

Most of the Chinese characters have two to three components, there are nearly 70% of the components have fixed name and meaning.

In order to split into different components, it is necessary to understand the structure of Chinese characters. That means, if you understood the structure of Chinese characters, you can easily split them into components. The following classifies all the structures:

Left and right

Top and bottom

Left, middle and right

Top, middle and bottom

Full surround

Semi surround

Surround from top

Surround from bottom

Surround from left

Surround from top right

Surround from top left

Surround from bottom left

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Stroke

Chinese characters are symbol system used to write Chinese, they are constructed by various types of strokes combined. Stroke is the smallest structural unit of the Chinese characters, which includes basic strokes and compound strokes.

Basic strokes

Basic strokes can be further subdivided into simple strokes and combining strokes. Unlike simple strokes, which are independent, combining strokes only appears when they are part of the compound strokes.

simple strokes

Horizontal (héng)	Vertical (shù)	Leftward (piě)	Rightward (nà)	Dot (diǎn)	Tick (tí)

Horizontal (héng)	Leftward (piě)	Dot (diǎn)

Vertical (shù)	Rightward (nà)	Tick (tí)

combining strokes

Fold (zhé)	Hook (gōu)	Curve (wān)	Slant (xié)

Compound strokes

Compound strokes are two or more basic strokes combined. Below are some examples:

Horizontal-leftward (héng-piě)
Horizontal-fold (héng-zhé)
Horizontal-hook (héng-gōu)
Horizontal-fold-hook (héng-zhé-gōu)
Vertical-fold (shù-zhé)
Vertical-hook (shù-gōu)
Leftward-fold (piě-zhé)
Curve-hook (wān-gōu)

Strokes order

This is just a guideline to help anyone to ease the pain on learning how to write and recognize Chinese characters. There are however some exceptional cases that conflict with the rules as shown below. Therefore, the main purpose of understand it is to learn how to write the characters, because it is the most rewarding practice to help remember and recognize Chinese characters.

Top down.
From left to right.
Horizontal before vertical.
Leftward before rightward.
The middle before the two sides.
Outer before inner when surround from top.
Inner before outer when surround from bottom.
Closing always at the end.

Learning tips and tricks

Character segmentation

As described earlier, there are regular patterns to form Chinese characters. Most characters such as associative compounds and pictophonetic compounds formed by two or more pictograms or ideograms. Therefore, we can break them into various components based on how they are structured, this helps to memorize the character based on the meaning and pronunciation from each part.

Pictophonetic method

It is easy to learn a series of similar characters based on two aspects. One is on the pictographic radicals, which is to understand and memorize the characters based on same symbol. Another is on the phonetic radicals that are similar in pronunciation.

pictograph radical

Woman radical
tā	mèi	jiě	mā	pó

She	Younger sister	Elder sister	Mother	Grandma

Water radical
hé	hǎi	yáng	fú	liú

River	Sea	Ocean	Float	Flow

phonetic radical

Phonetic ma
mǎ	mā	má	mǎ	mà

Horse	Mother	Ant	Yard	Scold

Phonetic yang
yáng	yáng	yǎng	yǎng	yàng

Goat	Ocean	Itch	Oxygen	Kind

Similarity and distinction

There are many Chinese characters that lookalike, but the meaning and pronunciation has big differences. Group these characters together and spot the subtle differences, then you can understand and remember the meaning and pronunciation of these characters effectively based on the differences.

rén	rù	bā

People	Enter	Eight

All of the three characters above have two strokes, which are piě (leftward) and nà (rightward), but the strokes have different lenghts and are connected differently.

dà	tài	tiān

Big	Overly	Sky

Character dà looked like a person with open arms, character tài and tiān add a diǎn (dot) and a héng (horizontal) respectively on top the character dà, these give you two different meanings. By grouping them together, we can learn all these characters easily using the compare-and-contrast method.