Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Chinese Characters
Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Chinese Characters
Chinese is a very fascinating language, not only because it is one of the hardest languages to learn but also because it is one of the oldest languages in the world. Mastering Chinese, even at a basic level, should be considered a personal triumph, considering the high number of Chinese characters you need to know to simply read a newspaper. However, unlike what we are used to when it comes to learning a new language, these characters are not organized into an alphabet because there is no Chinese alphabet_per se_ .
Although most languages use alphabets, Chinese doesn’t. Chinese is all about Chinese characters – thousands of them. If you are familiar with the Japanese writing system , you will know that each character represents a syllable or even an entire word, but we’ll get to that later.
Now, written Chinese may be a bit overwhelming in the beginning, but if you are really passionate and dedicated, uncovering the beauty of the Chinese alphabet and its characters will give you a great sense of accomplishment.
Here’s a quick example of how ingenious Chinese characters can be. While 电_diàn_ translates to“electric” ,“brain” is 脑_nǎo_ and if you put these two characters together, you get电脑 diànnǎo which means“computer” . Electric brain = computer! See what they did there? Absolutely fascinating! Let’s find out what exactly you should expect if you want to learn Chinese.
The Chinese language in a nutshell
As you probably already know,Chinese (汉语 or_Hànyǔ_) is not necessarily a single language – Mandarin, but more of a macrolanguage or a family of East Asian languages spoken by 1.3 billion people all around the world. Can you imagine? Roughly 17% of the world’s population speak some variety of Chinese as their native language.
Varieties of Chinese
Before getting into a little history, you should know that the varieties of Chinese are united by a common written language or a common writing system. While some people consider these varieties of Chinese dialects, others regard them as distinct languages because more often than not they are unintelligible.
Standard Chinese, generally referred to as Mandarin, is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, The Republic of China (also known as Taiwan) and one of the four official languages of Singapore.
So how many varieties of Chinese are there? That depends on how you choose to count and categorize them, but many sources seem to agree that there are over200 distinct varieties of Chinese in 13 dialect groups.
Out of these 13 groups of dialects, there are 7 that are considered major: Mandarin, Yue (Cantonese), Xiang, Min, Gan, Wu and Hakka.
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The history of the Chinese language and its alphabet
Chinese is not what we’d call a new language. Chinese is a language with a long tradition that has touched the lips of many great emperors from many great dynasties before becoming the language we all know (or wished we’d known) today. If we also count in Old Chinese , which is the oldest attested stage of Chinese and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese, we could say that Chinese is around 3200 years old. No less than three millennia of tradition!
The form of written Chinese that developed from Old Chinese between 220 CE and the end of the Han dynasty, in the 3rd century CE, is known as Classical Chinese or literary Chinese. This formal written language continued to be used until the beginning of the 20th century. At the same time, written vernacular Chinese also developed alongside it.
Meanwhile, spoken Chinese continued to evolve into Middle Chinese, the ancestor of almost all modern Chinese varieties. However, Middle Chinese was most a single unified language, but a family of mutually intelligible dialects that began diverging into different directions around the 10th century CE.
Chinese antique calligraphic text
Then, in the early 20th century, written vernacular Chinese based on the Beijing dialect was introduced as the new official written language instead of Classical Chinese. People often refer to this standard language as Mandarin because it is based on the Mandarin dialect of Beijing. Thus, Standard Chinese or Mandarin now fulfills the role that Classical Chinese used to fulfill as the official written language that’s used by speakers of all varieties of Chinese.
The Chinese writing system and the Chinese alphabet – an overview
The Chinese language is written using Chinese characters or 漢字_(hànzì) _ . As already mentioned, there is no such thing as a Chinese alphabet, so we’ll continue by talking about the Chinse characters. These are logograms or single characters that represent entire syllables, entire words or entire units of meaning. For example, 漢_(hàn) _ means“China” and 字_(zì) _ means“character” . Together they translate to“Chinese character” ( hànzì) .
Chinese characters need to be learned one by one because, unfortunately for us, western speakers, knowing the pronunciation of a word doesn’t give you any clue on how to write it.
Don’t worry though. There is also good news for us, Chinese beginners! Speakers of all varieties of Chinese typically write in Standard Chinese even though their spoken language is different. Of course, they’ll pronounce each character in their local variety of Chinese but use the Standard Chinese characters. Nevertheless, you should also note that Chinese languages are often different in terms of grammar and vocabulary. So whatever variety of Chinese you choose to learn, it’s best to stick to it until the end so you won’t get confused.
- Title: Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Chinese Characters
- Author: Christopher
- Created at : 2024-08-08 09:35:25
- Updated at : 2024-08-09 09:35:25
- Link: https://mondly-stories.techidaily.com/step-by-step-guide-to-mastering-chinese-characters/
- License: This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.