basic mandarin #1: 汉字 hànzi characters
Chinese characters are incredibly important when learning Mandarin (or any Chinese language). Unlike Japanese, there is no alphabet, so being able to at least recognize characters is imperative. In this post, I’ll cover the basics of Chinese characters: how they’re created; their structure; and radicals.
1. How Chinese Characters Are Formed (or 六书 liùshū)
There are six ways characters are formed. I’ll describe the first four in more detail, but I will only briefly touch on the last two at the end.
A. 象形字 xiàngxíngzì pictographs
These characters are derived from a picture
B. 指事字 zhǐshìzì ideogram/self-explanatory
These characters are, as the name suggests, self-explanatory. They indicate their meaning
The best examples of these are numbers and the words for up and down:
一 one, 二 two, 三 three, 上 up, 下 down
C. 会意字 huìyìzì compound ideogram/associative compounds
These characters are usually formed of two or more pictographs
人 (person)＋木 (tree)＝休 to rest (person leaning against a tree)
日 (sun)＋月 (moon)＝明 (bright)
木＋木＋木＝森 (three trees=forest)
***森＋林＝森林 (forest, sēnlín)***
D. 形声字 xíngshēngzì phonogram/phonetic compounds
For these characters, there is a phonetic base and a radical that lends meaning. Here’s a great article about it. (radicals will be explained below)
The other two methods are not about creating characters so much as using existing characters in different ways, so I will not cover those here.
While it is not imperative that you know all of the ways characters are formed, it’s good to just be aware of the history of characters.
Radicals are root words from which Chinese words originate. Every character contains at least one radical, and radicals usually lend meaning to characters. In the graph above for phonograms, the first character has 木 tree as its base, lending the pronunciation, but the character’s radical (水 water) is what lends the character meaning.
While radicals lend meaning to characters, they can also be independent words. It is important to know radicals for a couple reasons. The first is that, when learning new characters, it’s easier to remember how to write them if you are able to break them down into components you already know. The second is that, when using a paper dictionary, you use a radical index to search for characters.
There are 214 radicals in total. Due to the sheer number of them, I’m just going to link you to a radical chart rather than typing them all out.
3. The Structure of Characters
I feel like the structure of characters is a little hard for me to put into words so I’ve hunted down some pictures from my old textbook to serve as a visual aid for this.
The first picture shows the four different structures of characters and how there can be multiple variations of each.
The second and third pictures show the many different ways radicals can be placed in a character.
Every single character is made up of strokes, and there are rules for how to write them. Some people find stroke order to be completely useless, but I’m going to tell you now: it’s really important. Why? Well, let me explain.
1. Learning stroke order helps you remember how to write characters. Simply put, it builds muscle memory.
2. Writing strokes in a certain order helps maintain the character’s proportions. If you write a certain part of a character wrong, it’s going to look really weird.
3. If you ever want to try your hand at Chinese calligraphy, you will need to know stroke order. Writing with a pen or pencil is different than using a brush to write characters. Not only is it important to maintain the balance of the character to achieve the proper aesthetic, but the more advanced you become in calligraphy the more noticeable it will become if you use improper stroke order. I could go into more detail, but I’ll save this topic for a rainy day.
So, without further ado, here are the rules of stroke order:
so that’s it for the first lesson. please please please tell me what you guys think. the next lesson i make will start with vocab and grammar but, like i said, i’m not going to do a post on pinyin bc that’s something you should learn from native speakers (i recommend yangyang cheng’s videos. they’re amazing resources)
i’ll be tagging all of these posts as mtzw basic mandarin so they’ll be easier to track down
