Introduction to Chinese characters
Introduction to Chinese characters
Chinese is written with characters (汉字 [漢字] Hànzì). Chinese characters have two forms: traditional and simplified. The origin of Chinese characters dated back to the 14th century BC in Shang Dynasty, known as scripts on oracle bones (甲骨文 jiǎ gǔ wén, characters inscribed on bones or tortoise shells). Chinese characters are ideographical. Usually, one character represents one word or a morpheme (a unit for constructing a word), which means one character contains the combined information of sound (pronunciation), shape (what it looks like) and meaning.
Types of Chinese characters
It is generally believed that Chinese characters were created and derived in six ways. They are: pictographic (e.g., 山 shān, mountain, hill, 人 rén, person, 口 kǒu, mouth, ), indicative (e.g., 一 yī, one; 二 èr, two; 三 sān, three; 上 shàng, up; 下 xià, down), pictophonectic, semasiographic (e.g., 明 míng, bright; 信 xìn, believe), phonetically loaned (e.g., 要 yào, want ->腰 yāo, waist, 北 běi, north-> 背 bèi, back) and mutually explanatory (e.g., 考 kǎo, test -> 老 lǎo, old; 顶 ding, top -> 巅 diān, peak). Amongst all these, pictophonetic characters account for 90% of all the characters. There are mainly four types ofpictophonetic characters: the left part of a character indicates the shape (often associated with the meaning of the character) and the right part indicates the sound of the character (e.g., 城 chéng, wall, city; 抖 dǒu, shake) and the other way around (战 zhàn, fight, war; 彰 zhāng, evident, clear); or the top part of a character indicates shape (meaning) and the bottom part indicates sound (e.g., 芳 fāng, fragrant; 岗 gang, hillock ) and the other way around (e.g., 想 xiǎng, think, miss; 熬 áo, boil (for a long time)).
The part that indicates meaning of a character is called radical. Each character has one radical that is associated with the meaning of the character. You can see some most commonly used radicals in a separate document.
The structure of Chinese characters
Chinese characters are square-shaped. They are made up of strokes. For example, the following image shows different strokes that the character 永 (yǒng, forever) has.
Although Chinese characters are square-shaped, the structures of characters are not all the same. The structures include single-element characters; top-bottom structure; left-right structure; left-middle- right; three quarters/one quarter division; half-enclosed; fully-enclosed, etc.
The following image shows different structures of Chinese characters:
There are general rules to follow in terms of writing Chinese characters. Broadly speaking, characters are written from left to right, top to bottom. If a character has an enclosed structure, what is inside the enclosure is written before the closing stroke. You can see examples in the character sheets.
If you would like to find out more about Chinese writing system, you can use the following links:
https://www.ancient.eu/Chinese_Writing/
http://blog.tutorming.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/how-do-chinese-characters-work
https://www.mandarintutor.com/resources/commonradicals
https://www.digmandarin.com/chinese-strokes-list.html
https://www.archchinese.com/arch_chinese_radicals.html
You can also watch some of the videos here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0h18Rdhb44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MCnjfws0XQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=troxvPRmZm8
References:
Lu, J. P., Pi, Y. G., & Liao, W. Z. (2009, December). Study on the ichnography structures of Chinese characters based on topological theory. In 2009 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
王宏源, 2019. 汉字字源入门. 社会科学文献出版社· 社会政法分社.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5364726
https://www.cultureyard.net/blog/how-to-write-chinese-characters-stroke-order
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B1%89%E5%AD%97