![]() ![]() Elements That Make Up a Chinese WordĬhinese verbs and adjectives generally consist of one character (syllable) but nouns often consist of two, three, or more characters (syllables). This means that workable literacy in the Chinese language only requires knowledge of between three to four thousand characters. But the good news is that a large number of those are rarely-used variants, accumulated throughout history. The simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used.Ĭhinese is famed for its huge number of characters, and some dictionaries contain more than 50,000 words as entries. The simplified characters have a lot fewer strokes and certain parts of some characters were completely eliminated. Most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today were the result of simplifications made by the government of China in the 1950s and 60s. The traditional form of Chinese characters was widely used up until the mid-twentieth century. Characters were inscribed on bones and shells that were used for divination. The earliest recognizable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 B.C. Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the second millennium B.C. These simple characters also sometimes serve as the root of a more complex character, and are called “radicals.” Some of these simple characters and logical combinations within the character still remain clear enough to see what they depict. Then, logical combinations of the simple characters followed. The first Chinese characters were simple objects like “human”, “hand”, “foot”, “mountain”, “sun”, “moon”, and “tree”. Some of these smaller pictures within the character give a hint as to meaning and pronunciation (though not always). Once you get the hang of them, they aren’t as difficult to remember as you may think.Īll characters are made up of smaller picture elements within the character. While Chinese characters are often thought of as extremely complex, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs that are assembled in different combinations. Chinese Uses Written Characters That are Known as 漢字 ( hànzi) ![]()
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