Contrary to somewhat popular perception, Chinese characters aren’t simply little pictures. Actually, most of them aren’t pictures in any respect. The very outdatedest, whose evolution could be traced again to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the stays of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. However most Chinese characters, or hanzi, are emblemgraphic, which signifies that each represents a different morpheme, or distinct unit of language: a phrase, or a single a part of a phrase that has no independent implying. No one is aware of for positive what number of hanzi exist, however close toly 100,000 have been documented to date.
Not that you should be taught all of them to achieve literacy: for that, a mere 3,000 to five,000 will do. Whereas it’s technically possible to memorize that many characters by rote, you’d do guesster to start by familiarizing yourself with their fundamental nature and structure — and in so doing, you’ll naturally be taught greater than a little about their lengthy history.
The TED-Ed lesson at the top of the post professionalvides a short however illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work,” utilizing animation to point out how historical symbols for concrete issues like a person, a tree, the solar, and water grew to become versatile sufficient to be combined into representations of eachfactor else — including summary concepts.
In the Mandarin Blueprint video just above, host Luke Neale goes deeper into the structure of the hanzi in use as we speak. Whether or not they be simplified versions of foremostland China or the traditional ones of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsethe place, they’re for essentially the most half constructed not out of complete fabric, he stresses, however from a set of existing components. Which will make a prospective be taughter really feel slightly much less daunted, as might the truth that toughly 80 percent of Chinese characters are “semantic-phowebic comkilos”: one component of the character professionalvides a clue to its implying, and another a clue to its professionalnunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes deciphering them an effortmuch less activity.)
Within the distant previous, hanzi had been additionally the one technique of fileing other Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Korean. Nonetheless as we speak, they continue to be central to the Japanese writing system, however like every other cultural type transplanted to Japan, they’ve laboriously gone unaltered there: the NativLang video just above explains the transformation they’ve beneathgone over millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. It wasn’t so very way back that, even of their residenceland, hanzi had been menaceened with the prospect of being scrapped within the dubious identify of modern efficiency. Now, with these aforemalestioned almost-100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable byout our Twenty first-century digital universe, it appears they’ll stick round — even longer, perhaps, than the Latin alphaguess you’re learning proper now.
Related content:
What Ancient Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction
Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write
The Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.