freeamfva: Chinese Alphabet? What You Need to Know About Written Chinese

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Chinese Alphabet? What You Need to Know About Written Chinese




Writing about the Chinese alphabet is a difficult task. In order to explain how Chinese people write in their language, we have to start by setting the record straight.To get more news about chinese letters alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.

You probably know that the English language uses 26 letters, and (less probably) that Russian has 33 characters in its Cyrillic alphabet. Now, when it comes to Chinese, things get a bit more complicated. Why? Because there isn’t such a thing as a Chinese alphabet.

Of course, Chinese has a writing system. A very complex one at that. But the way in which Chinese symbols are put together is very different from how we connect letters to make words. In fact, most Chinese characters make up entirely words, although many words are represented by two symbols or more.

Chinese characters, then, are not letters, but a set of pictures that speakers associate with a specific meaning and a specific series of sounds.

The “Chinese alphabet”, one of the oldest writing systems in the world, slowly evolved over 2000 years until 1950 when the government decided to introduce simplified Mandarin characters to boost China’s literacy rates.

These simplified symbols, the most widely used in present-day China, are the ones we will discuss below.The table below introduces the 24 basic Chinese symbols, which correspond to keyboard letters with their corresponding literal meaning. This is the most similar thing to a Chinese alphabet you will be able to find.

You can help your memory by noting cases where English letters are similar to certain Chinese character shapes:

Doesn’t 戈, look like a lowercase that’s been knocked off balance?

Or take 大, which resembles a rotated version of , and 卜, which can be seen as an upside-down .

Then, there is a major variant of 中, , which looks almost exactly like a lowercase , or 廿 which resembles two lowercase ’s.

Remove the highest stroke from 山 and you are left with , which looks just like .

As you can see, Chinese characters are not so difficult to learn after all.There’s not an exact number, but there are approximately 55,000 Chinese characters. Still, bear in mind that no Chinese speaker knows every character.

Actually, to write day-to-day Chinese as comfortably as a native speaker, you would only need to master between 500 and 700 Chinese characters.

And if you want to learn Chinese so you can read Chinese newspapers? Then you’ll need to identify 2,000 characters.

So, how many characters does the average Chinese speaker know? Around 7,000, although well-educated people might know up to 9,000, still a very small percentage of all existing Chinese symbols.
Learn Chinese Faster With Radicals
Chinese radicals are the base elements of Chinese characters that help determine the meaning of each symbol. They are often in the leftmost part of the character but can be on top or on the right too. If you want to look up a word in a dictionary, you will need to know the Chinese radicals, since they are used to organise the entries (since there isn’t a Chinese alphabet, each character is listed under its radical).

These graphic components are often semantic indicators (they tell you what the characters mean), though there are a few cases in which the semantic connection is less clear due to historical changes in meaning.

Let’s see an example.

氵is the water radical, and is made up of three strokes. This means that any word you see that has these three little strokes on the side is related to water in some way. This is great news for learners. Though you may not recognise a character if the water radical is included, the options of what the character might be narrow down by a big margin.