Chinese Characters

Previous Top Next

---

Chinese characters are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and partly used in the Japanese and (South) Korean languages. The use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language, in which they were used until the 20th century, and from North Korea, where in normal writings they have been completely replaced by Hangul.

Contrary to popular belief, only a small number of Chinese characters are pictographic. Most characters were created based on other characters that were/are homonyms.

In Chinese, a word or phrase is composed of one or more characters. Each Chinese character is read as a single syllabic unit in all spoken variants of Chinese still existing today.

In the twentieth century, thousands of simplified characters were created or adopted in mainland China. Now written Chinese has two systems: Simplified Chinese Characters, which are mainly used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia; and Traditional Chinese Characters, which are mainly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Both Simplified Chinese Characters and Traditional Chinese Characters are used in oversea Chinese communities, depending on the origins of the Chinese groups.

Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters tend to occupy a more-or-less square area. Chinese Characters maintain a uniform size and shape by squashing multiple parts (Strokes/Radicals) together. Because of this, beginners often practise writing Chinese Characters on square-gridded exercise paper, and the Chinese sometimes call the Chinese Characters "square characters".

The precise number of characters in existence is disputed. Estimates range from 40,000 to 80,000, but fluency in Chinese requires knowledge of approximately 3000-5000 characters.

Tips: For more information about concepts of Chinese Characters, see the embedded lessons.