Unlike somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters are not only small images. In fact, most of them are not photos at all. The oldest, the evolution of which can be traced in the “Oracle Bone” script of the 13th century before JC engraved directly on the remains of turtles and oxen, bear traces of their pictograms ancestors. But most Chinese characters, or hanziare logographical, which means that everyone represents a different morpheme, or a unity distinct from language: a word or a single part of a word that does not have an independent meaning. No one knows with certainty how much hanzi Exist, but almost 100,000 have been documented so far.
Not that you need to learn them all to reach literacy: for this, only 3,000 to 5,000 will do the trick. Although it is technically possible to memorize so many characters by heart, you better start by familiarizing yourself with their fundamental nature and structure – and in doing so, you will naturally learn more than on their long history.
Ted-Ed's lesson at the top of the post Provides a brief but illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work”, using animation to show how ancient symbols for concrete things like a person, a tree, the sun and water have become versatile enough to be combined in representations of everything else – including abstract concepts.
In Mandarin beach video just aboveThe Luke Neale host goes deeper into the structure of hanzi used today. Whether it is simplified versions of continental China or traditional Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, they are mostly built in whole fabric, it emphasizes, but from a set of existing components. This can ensure that a potential learner feels a little less intimidated, as well as the fact that around 80% of Chinese characters are “semantic-phonetic compounds”: a component of the character provides an index of his meaning, and another an index of his pronunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes them decipher a effortless task.)
In the distant past, hanzi were also the only way to record other Asian languages, such as Vietnamese and Korean. Even today, they remain at the heart of the Japanese writing system, but like any other cultural form transplanted in Japan, they did not remain unchanged there: The Nativlang video just above Explains the transformation they have undergone during the millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. Not so long ago that, even in their homeland, hanzi have been threatened with the prospect of being rebuilt in the doubtful name of modern efficiency. Now, with the above -mentioned people of nearly 100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable in our 21st century digital universe, it seems that they will remain – even longer, perhaps, that the Latin alphabet that you are reading at the moment.
Related content:
What the ancient Chinese look like – and how we know it: an animated introduction
Discover Nüshu, a Chinese writing system from the 19th century that only women knew how to write
The world writing systems have explained, from the Latin alphabet to the abugidas of India
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
