Once you've read the
introduction on how to learn to write Chinese,
it's time to get on with learning the essential concepts. This is the middle
article in my series on how to learn to write Chinese. The whole series
has three posts which I'd recommend you read in order.
As you can see, I'm trying to build you up to a level of knowledge where you can
make progress and plan your studies yourself. This series of articles is
intended to let you approach learning to write Chinese in a rational, effective
way by letting you understand the challenge you're dealing with.
(Note: like the introduction, this post is aimed
at total beginners who have little to no knowledge of the Chinese language. The
goal is to give you the knowledge you need to make a good start with learning to
write Chinese and to learn it on your own. If you already have some experience
with Chinese, you might want to skip to the
final article, and
also read Olle Linge's
‘sensible way’
of learning to write Chinese.)
Key concepts in learning to write Chinese
With those general reminders out of the way, let's have a look at the actual
concepts you need to have to learn to write Chinese.
What is a Chinese character?
This is a big question! There is a huge amount of ongoing academic research into
this question, but we don't need to concern ourselves with that here. All I want
to explain here is the most basic idea of a Chinese character so that you can
better equipped to learn to write Chinese.
First up: Chinese characters are not an alphabet. That is, Chinese characters are not letters and do not
‘spell’ words. Instead, each Chinese character is one syllable, has
a set of meanings and fits into a square space. Have a look at these four
characters and their pronunciations. Don't worry about the pronunciations at the
moment - we're only interested in learning to write Chinese here!
- 快 (kuài) fast
- 杯 (bēi) cup
- 树 (shù) tree
- 跑 (pǎo) run
As you can see, each character has a one-syllable pronunciation, and a meaning.
One meaning has been given for each of the four characters above, but
characters often have several meanings. Sometimes they can have different
pronunciations as well! In the early stages, though, you don't need to worry
about that. You'll be learning
one meaning and one pronunciation per character.
You might have noticed that the meaning given for each character above seems to
be a word. This is often the case: single characters can often be words on their
own. However, ‘words’ and ‘characters’ are not the same thing in Chinese.
Words are often made up of two or more characters.
Have a look at these two characters:
Again, we seem to have two perfectly meaningful words there. However, these
two characters can combine to form a word:
By combining the characters for ‘middle’ and ‘country’, we get the word for
‘China’. This is why people sometimes claim that ‘China’ is called ‘the middle
kingdom’ in Chinese. It's certainly true that the word for ‘China’ is made up of
the characters for ‘middle’ and ‘country’.
The other important thing to understand is that whilst individual characters can
often be words, multiple-character words are the norm. What do I mean by that?
Well, you saw above that the character 国
(guó) means ‘country’ on its own. However, to say
“country” in a sentence you'd actually use a two-character word:
We've put another character, 家
(jiā), after the one for country, to make a word
that means “country”. This might seem pointless, but it's how the language
works!
One reason most words contain two or more characters is that
it makes things clearer. Modern Chinese has a very limited set of syllables
(about 400 without tones), so the spoken language would get very confusing if
each word was just one syllable. The tones in Chinese are one way to make words
more distinct, and having multiple characters per word is another.
In the past, Chinese was much more monosyllabic (one syllable per word), and
there was a much closer relationship of one word per character. In modern
Chinese, though, most words are two characters. They can be any number of
characters, in fact, but two is most common. As you learn Chinese words, you'll
find that this has a cool side effect: when you learn a new character, you can
often combine it with other characters you know to get several different words.
Chinese character components
Hopefully you've now got some idea of what the term ‘Chinese character’ actually
means. If you'd like to know more, there's endless amounts of material about the
topic online. For the purposes of this guide to learning to write Chinese,
though, I think the above goes into enough detail.
The next thing you need to know is that
individual Chinese characters can be broken down. Each character is made up of
components. Have a look at this character:
This character means ‘river’. You can actually break it down into two parts:
- 氵
(shuǐ)
water
- 可
(kě)
able
The first one seems to make sense: it means ‘water’, which is clearly related to
‘river’. But what's that second part doing? The meaning, ‘able’, doesn't seem to
have anything to do with ‘river’. But look at the pronunciation of that second
part: kě. It sounds quite similar to the pronunciation of the character: hé.
It's almost like this character is saying “it's something to do with water and
it sounds like kě". A lot of Chinese characters work this way: one part gives
you a hint about how to pronounce it, and one part gives you a hint about what
it means.
These components can combine into characters in all sorts of ways: side by
side, on top, underneath, inside, outside etc. As you learn more characters,
you'll learn to spot the different components that they contain. It's very
important that you pay attention to these different components and what they
mean. Focusing on the components and thinking about how they form characters
makes it much easier to remember how to write Chinese characters.
How many characters?
One question that often comes up when people begin learning to read and write
Chinese is “how many Chinese characters are there?” There are all sorts of
different numbers given for this, some of which are quite scary, but you don't
really need to worry about it. Some people might say you “only need” 3000
characters or some other figure, but again, you don't need to think about it.
One big problem with talking about how many characters are necessary to read and
write is that characters are not the same thing as words, as I explained above.
You also need to know structure and pronunciation and grammar and all sorts of
other things to be able to read and write Chinese. There's no point fixating on
any specific number of characters. People don't tend to ask “how many French
words are there?” when they start learning French, and it's equally pointless
asking the same thing about Chinese characters.
If any of the numbers seem intimidating, just ignore them. Your rate of learning
will dramatically increase as you go on, especially in the early stages. At any
time, the only thing you can do is just keep moving forwards. In the first year
you'll make absolutely staggering progress if you put in a little bit of time
each day. I would strongly recommend that you focus on making progress and not
on reaching some ultimate goal figure.
Important distinctions
It's probably a good idea to make a few more things clear before I describe the
actual method I think is best for learning to write Chinese.
Simplified and traditional
There are two broad sets of Chinese characters in use to write Chinese. These
are called ‘simplified’ and ‘traditional’ Chinese characters. These are just
different ways of writing the same characters. They are definitely not
separate languages or anything like that. Unfortunately, the relationship
between the simplified and traditional character sets isn't totally
straightforward. There isn't an easy one-to-one conversion.
This situation came about roughly as follows (I'm cutting out all sorts of
details here to make this easier to understand). In the past, there were only
traditional Chinese characters. Then the Chinese government decided to make
some of those simpler, but not all, by reducing the number of strokes and
swapping components for less complex ones.
In some cases, two or more traditional characters got reduced into one simplified one.
So we've got a new set of characters, simplified Chinese, that has a lot of
overlap with the old set. The tricky bit is that
some simplified characters map to several different traditional ones.
(If you want to get anal about this explanation and point out how simplified it is then go ahead and do so in the comments. I've reduced it to the generalisations so that people new to Chinese can get a rough understanding of it.)
I don't think it's worth going into any more detail than that as this guide is
aimed at helping beginners start to learn to write Chinese. The only thing you
need to be concerned with at this stage is whether you want to learn simplified
characters or traditional characters. Some people learn both from the start,
which is another option.
Here's my personal guide to making the choice:
- You're only interested in mainland China or Singapore: learn simplified.
- You're only interested in Hong Kong or Taiwan: learn traditional.
- You're only interested in Classical Chinese: learn traditional.
- You're a bit of a language nerd and/or you're interested in everything:
learn both.
I wouldn't worry too much about making the ‘wrong choice’ at this stage. It is
entirely possible to learn the other set at any stage regardless of which one
you started with, in my view.
I would also say that, despite the name,
simplified Chinese characters are not any easier to learn. Some people would
disagree, but having less strokes in a character barely makes a difference to
remembering it, if you ask me. ‘Color’ isn't any easier to remember than ‘colour’
in English. Sometimes the extra detail and logic in traditional characters make
them easier to learn than simplified ones.
Reading vs writing
You should also consider the huge difference between being able to read Chinese
and being able to write Chinese. It's totally possible to learn to read this
language without being able to write it at all, which is less true of European
languages. There are indeed many foreigners (and Chinese people) who can read
Chinese perfectly well but can't write it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
If you really do want to learn to write Chinese, that's great. Just make sure
you consider how worthwhile it is, when
learning to just read Chinese is dramatically easier and less time consuming
(you should probably think of reading as quite a separate skill to writing,
actually).
Oral vs written Chinese
Another consideration to make is whether you actually want to deal with the
written language at all. Most people do, but it is a choice.
You will progress with your spoken Chinese a lot faster if you ignore the written language.
Personally I think it'd be a real shame to miss out on the wonders of written
Chinese, but I do think it's totally valid to just learn to speak and listen if
that's your priority.
As you saw above, written Chinese is somewhat phonetic some of the time, but
realistically you generally don't know how to write a word just from knowing how
to say it (occasionally you do the get the joy of guessing how to write a
character, though). Again, unlike European languages, this creates a huge chasm
between being able to speak Chinese and being able to read and write it.
You will learn to write Chinese differently to how Chinese people learn it
The final thing I want to point out in this ‘key concepts’ section is that as a
non-native speaker, you should learn to write Chinese in a completely different
way to native speakers. Chinese native speakers tend to learn to write their
language in a very traditional style based on rote-repetition. This is a
horrible method, but it works for native speakers for the following reasons:
- They're in class surrounded by other people doing the same thing and a
teacher telling them to do it, so they're quite motivated to do it.
- They've got ten years of school time to do it in.
- They have a deep understanding of the spoken language that they can relate to
learning to write.
- They're surrounded by Chinese characters every day.
You probably don't have all four of these points on your side, and even if you
do, there's a far better way to learn to write Chinese. The rote-learning method
doesn't actually work all that well even for native speakers. Many people in
China today struggle to remember how to write Chinese characters one they're out
of school or university, because they type far more than they handwrite, and you
only need to know the pronunciation of a character to type it.
I think it's worth explaining this here, because if you use Chinese textbooks or
attend a Chinese class, there is usually an assumption that the best way for you
to learn to write Chinese characters is the same way that most Chinese people
learn, when that's not true. In the next section, I'll explain what I think is a
much better way to learn to write Chinese.