How many symbols in chinese language

Learn Chinese in China. Phone Number. Wechat ID. Current Location? How did you find Hutong School? Your message. Are you a returning student? Subscribe to our newsletter. Leave this field blank. Follow us. Hutong School. Search form Search. It tops English, which has million speakers. Knowing a language that people recognize around the world will open doors for you that you never thought possible.

And there are tangible benefits to knowing a foreign language: A sense of multiculturalism, greater confidence, more multitasking skills, better career opportunities, higher creativity, and sharper cognitive thinking. One of the unique aspects of the Chinese language is that there are six types of Chinese symbols, which makes the Chinese alphabet seem even more complex than it actually is. Another aspect is that one radical root can be used to create several words and express a variety of meanings.

That is why the Great Compendium of Chinese Characters has 54, characters, the Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form has , characters, and a modern dictionary has up to 20, characters. All Chinese characters are logograms or logographs; that is, they each represent words.

Hieroglyphs or pictographs: Simple pictures of objects which represent words, syllables, or sounds. Ideographs or semantic compounds: Symbols which represent the meaning of a word.

They are abstract concepts which combine two or more pictographs with either one following the other or the second having a special placement within the first to change the meaning. Ideograms or combined ideographs: Ideograms represent words, syllables, or morphemes the smallest grammatical unit of a language.

Ideograms differ from ideographs in that they combine two or more pictographs or ideographs to create new meanings. They are also written differently with the pictographs or ideographs being one on top of the other. Phonograms or phonetic compounds: Words that are actually a combination of a pictogram and phonetic character, or two logographs, to create new meanings.

They contain two parts: One is the radical element showing the meaning, and the other is the phonetic component showing pronunciation. Transfer characters: Interchangeable characters which have the same radical and meaning, but the words themselves are different. It's like how English speakers sometimes say "old man" or "dad" instead of "father," though all have essentially the same meaning. Loan characters: Words for abstract concepts where the character from one word acquires another meaning to create a new word.

Peking Man has given scientists important clues about the origins of human language, especially such a phonetic language as Chinese. The creation of Chinese characters was a long and gradual process which people engaged in all across ancient China. It is for this reason that the Chinese language is deeply interconnected with Chinese philosophy and medicine. First, people created Chinese symbols from family or clan emblems to decorate everyday tools.

They formed them from simple drawings of animals and nature. Their meanings were visually obvious to everyone regardless of blood relations.

That is why even today, people speaking different Chinese dialects can understand each other through writing Chinese characters.

The creation of oracle bone script was next. People used this system to write the script onto turtle shells and animal bones, and then heat them until cracks appeared.

They would then interpret the patterns for divination purposes, such as predicting the weather. The name itself literally translates to "wind water. Oracle bone script numeral system via Wikimedia Commons. After oracle bone script came rebus writing, where the symbol for one word is the same as another word with a similar sound. It was extremely easy to use this since Chinese is a very monosyllabic language.

With rebus writing, a particular Chinese symbol would represent an object, while a verb, pronoun, or another word would use the same symbol because the pronunciation of the word had the same sound or a similar sound.

Next came the practice of polysemy, or using the same Chinese symbol for two words with different sounds that share a similar meaning. Lastly came the creation of compound Chinese symbols. Chinese characters were developed into several different styles , or scripts, over time:. Comparison of Chinese characters for "autumn" via Wikimedia Commons. Find out more about the three Japanese Alphabets here.

In English we learn the 26 letters, but in Chinese there is no alphabet. You learn the characters which make words. Words are made up of 1, 2 or 3 characters in most cases. Therefore, Chinese is very much about memorizing the characters. It gets easier as you go on!

A good start is to learn the most common Chinese Characters. To read a book, magazine or newspaper you need to master over 2, Chinese characters. Yes some Chinese characters can have more than one meaning and be pronounced in different ways. Generally the context of the sentence gives this away. There are 11 basic strokes that make up all Chinese characters. For example, using the wrong stroke order means the ink lands differently on the page, and can prove your character to be incorrect.

You can discover more about Chinese Stroke Order here. Actually some are the same or have very subtle differences. It entirely depends on the character. Some are very different though and appear much more complex. It may also be dependant on your location. Likewise, if you fancy starting your language learning journey with us our Online Chinese classes are the perfect solution, super cheap, and super high quality! Get involved!

We also give plenty of handy information on learning Chinese , useful apps to learn the language and everything going on at our LTL schools! You will get a reply from us Your email address will not be published. Name and Email are required. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. One of the best articles I've read about Mandarin, realy in depth.

Thanks Max, will check out the numbers one also. Thank you very much! I'm away right now, so I will get back to you by email as soon as possible.

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