Understanding Chinese characters
Learning Chinese characters can be a struggle to begin with but once the basics have been mastered each new character can take you on a fascinating journey through Chinese history and culture. In the language section we have an introduction to the Chinese language and also show how the characters are drawn with brush or pen strokes. Here we look at the basic classes of characters and the origins of some of the most frequently used characters in Chinese.

Ancient scripts

The Chinese script is not the oldest known script. The Cuneiform script from about 5,500 years ago was used in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq and Iran) and was in use for about 3,000 years. Over 750,000 clay tablets using the cuneiform characters have been unearthed. The language was decoded in 1850 by Sir Henry Rawlinson ➚. In Egypt at around 5,000 years ago the famous hieroglyphic script developed; in this case the characters are pictograms but the script fell out of use by 500CE. In India the short-lived Harappa Culture (4,500-3,700BCE) also had an ancient script. The written script in China can only be traced back with certainty to the oracle bones of about 1,200BCE. However the script had a considerable vocabulary and signs of simplification at that date which strongly suggest the origin of the script goes back much further. It is likely that earlier writings were made on perishable material such as bamboo that have now been lost. What make Chinese unique is that the script forms have evolved directly to become the present day characters and so it is the longest lived script still in use in the world. As well as the oracle bone script, inscriptions became common on bronze ware from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. These inscriptions used the 金文 Jīn wén script which is less informative than the oracle bones as it just records who owned and made the vessel - the longest inscription is just 42 characters long. Around 2,000 of these Jinwen characters are ancestors of modern day forms.

Chinese Character categories
The characters are split into groups. The first are the ancient pictographs, these characters are derived from drawings of objects in everyday life probably over 10,000 years ago. During the period 5,000 to 6,000 years ago the pictures were augmented with indirect and abstract symbols, this class is called the 指事 zhǐ shì ‘refer to things’. Different kingdoms in the China area devised their own characters and it all became quite confusing. It was the discovery of writing on oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200BCE) that has greatly added to the knowledge of the characters used in ancient days. At this time the characters remained mainly pictorial, it was then and in the later Han Dynasty that characters began to include components that indicate how they should be pronounced - the phonetic part. Up until then looking at a character gave no hint as to how to say it. Nowadays about 80% of characters have a phonetic part indicating how it might be pronounced, these are called the 形声 xíng shēng ‘appear sound’ class of character . The phonetics over the centuries have changed and recognizing the phonetic part is not a totally reliable guide to pronunciation. As well as phonetic components there are a relatively small number of ‘meaning’ or ‘determinative’ components; these radicals indicate that the character which uses it is in a particular class of thing - for example the 木 wood radical is used in over 1,500 characters all with an association with plants or wood and 心 heart radical is used in many characters describing an emotion.
Since the Han dynasty the core characters has remained pretty much unaltered over 2,000 years but new characters are needed and archaic ones have fallen out of use. The classic script which came into use c. 400CE has been used for official documents ever since. The writing of officials and scholars was not used by everyday people and the term ‘Chinese Latin’ has been used to make the allusion to Europe when only the educated elite would use Latin not the vernacular language.
Over the centuries the original pictures have been simplified for ease of writing with a brush. In the list of characters below on the left in brown is the original script ‘picture’ from the Shang or Zhou dynasties - 3,000 years ago. In blue is the modern script which uses lines and avoids curves as much as it can. These simplifications can make deciphering characters difficult.
The story of how characters originated
One well known story is that the legendary god/emperor Fuxi devised the characters from the Eight Trigrams from Yin/Yang system and that the characters developed from these eight. There is neither logic nor evidence for this idea.
According to another tradition it was Cang Jie ➚ 仓颉 who devised the characters at the time of the Yellow Emperor. He observed the footprints of animals and birds and realized how just the shape of the print uniquely identified the animal. He could just draw the simple footprint shape rather than the whole animal. From this idea he applied the same principle to devising pictographs for many everyday objects (sun; moon; earth; clouds; birds; animals etc.). These characters (象形 xiàng xíng image shapes) have made their way into Japanese (Kanji ➚) and Korean scripts (Hangul ➚) too; so learning Chinese characters helps you read a little in Japan and Korea.

The full set of 200,000 or so characters have been divided into classes based on their origin for thousands of years. Fortunately, to get by in Chinese you only need to master about 500 of them. The vast majority (90%) are made up of a ‘radical’ combined with another element rather than a single pictorial representation. Liu Xin ➚ and Xu Shen ➚ of the Han Dynasty used six classes: pictographs; indirect symbols; associative compounds; mutually interpreted symbols; borrowed characters and determinative phonetics. Xu Shen produced the influential 说文解字 Shuō wén jiě zì ➚ in about 100CE where he identified 540 common components (mainly radicals).
Character forms
The form of the characters went through an evolution from the early oracle bones. The 小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ script has curves and fine lines and was the standard form imposed by the Qin dynasty. The forms are still used today on seals and other pieces of artwork. These replaced the early 大篆 Dà zhuàn ‘large seal’ form that was used in the Zhou dynasty principally on bronze work. The change in form was driven by using a brush rather than a stylus to inscribe them. In the latter part of the Zhou dynasty an unusual script became popular, this was the ‘Bird and insect script ➚’ where characters were drawn as stylized birds and insects, it fizzled out when the Qin dynasty came to power.
It was during the following Han dynasty that the characters took the step of being square in form with straight strokes and not curves. The 隶书 Lì shū ‘clerical script’ and 楷书 kǎi shū ‘standard script’ had evolved during the Qin dynasty because they were faster to write with a brush than the older ‘seal’ forms. The regular ‘kaishu’ script has less variation of stroke than ‘lishu’; Lishu is more suited to calligraphy. Writing individual strokes in this script with a brush is slow, and so for reason of speed and also artistry a different script is used. The common form of this running or cursive script is 草书 cǎo shū ‘grass script’ but this can be challenging to read.
By the Song dynasty the printing of books became common. In a break to using a brush, the characters were engraved on wood with a knife. This made straight strokes easier to make than curves and use thin horizontal but thick vertical strokes. This 宋体字 Sòng tǐ zì style of calligraphy is still commonly seen in books and fine art.
Picture characters






























Abstract notions
Characters have to identify more than just physical objects, words are needed for more abstract notions like spatial relationships. The following is a selection of a few common characters where the drawing brings an abstract idea to life.












Character combinations
Once you have a basic set of characters they can now be combined into composite characters in various ways to form new ideographs. This class of characters is called the 会意 huì yì associative compounds. The way they are combined can become complicated as sometimes the original meaning has been lost and the combination of characters has no discernible logic.









A set of ancient pictographs showing the different representations in ‘large seal’ 大篆 Dà zhuàn (over 2,000 years old) ; 小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ (about 2,000 years old) and modern script. The first set are the picture based representations for bird, fish, sheep or goat, man, large and heaven. There is quite a lot of variation between ancient forms as it was never standardized.

Second set of ancient pictographs showing the different representations in ‘large seal’ 大篆 Dà zhuàn (over 2,000 years old) ; 小篆 Xiǎo zhuàn ‘small seal’ (about 2,000 years old) and modern script. The second set are the picture based representations for small, middle, moon, sun, rain and mountain.
Phonetic Characters
Devising individual ‘pictures’ for hundreds of characters becomes unmanageable. Quite apart from the difficulty of making a rough representation, there is the problem of giving a guide on how to pronounce the character as a picture gives no clue. To get around this issue most Chinese characters use a radical that gives a hint to the pronunciation rather than the meaning. An example is the character for horse 马 mǎ. The phonetic sound ‘ma’ can be found in other characters pronounced ‘ma’ such as mother 妈 mā and question mark 吗 mǎ.
Unfortunately over the years pronunciation in Chinese (as with all other languages) has changed and the phonetic part has become in some cases misleading. For example the character for wrap; cover 包 bāo does give the pronunciation for 饱 bǎo but for 炮 pào the ‘b’ has become a ‘p’. The phonetic characters represent about 80% of all characters.
Phonetic Borrowing
In a further twist of complexity there are characters that have ‘robbed’ other characters of their representations. When two characters were pronounced the same then they were often written down using the most common character that sounded the same - almost like a phonetic spelling. Over time a character was robbed of its old form and to make this unambiguous the old usage had a component added to distinguish the two meanings. As an example 莫 mò ‘do not’ has taken over the representation for sunset (a representation of the sun seen through trees). The character it robs from is now written as 暮 mù which still means ‘sunset; dusk’. They used to be both pronounced the same: mù. To distinguish them the character 日 rì ‘sun’ was added beneath 莫. Looking at 莫 mò nowadays gives no clue as to why ‘do not’ has this pictographic representation.
Chinese Words
There is only so far you can go with characters, they all need to be easy to recognize uniquely and have to be learned by heart. Basic literacy is considered to require learning 2,000 characters. This figure clearly indicates that characters are not ‘words’, there are hundreds of thousands of words in both English and Chinese. In Chinese a single character rarely establishes meaning, this is certainly true in spoken Chinese when hundreds of characters sound exactly the same. To give a clear meaning two or more characters are used together to form a word. Typically the characters reinforce each other in meaning, both separately refer to more or less the same thing and so dispel ambiguity. A classic example is 朋友 péng yǒu where both 朋 and 友 independently mean friend but taken together they unambiguously mean friend. In my dictionary there are 15 homophones for 朋 péng including 膨 swollen; 棚 shed; 鬅 disheveled and 篷 sail; while 友 yǒu has 13 homophones including: 懮 relaxed; 牖 lattice window; 黝 dark green and 泑 ceramic glaze. Hearing péng yǒu immediately identifies the meaning as friend.
Putting characters together forms a composite ‘word’ idea. 笑话 xiào huà joke is made up of 笑 xiào laugh; smile 话 huà speech; words. There are many examples of this, where the combination conveys a more precise meaning than the individual parts.
It is also quite common for two characters together to have a meaning quite separate from the component characters, rather like the case of some components within a single character described above. For example 东 dōng 'east' and 西 xī 'west' in combination means literally east and west but also general thing, stuff 东西 dōng xī. Another example is 雪恨 xuě hèn avenge which is made up of 雪 snow and 恨 hate or 尘世 chén shì mundane life made up of 尘 dust, dirt and 世 age, era, life or finally 歪风 wāi fēng unhealthy trend, bad influence made up of 歪 crooked and 风 wind.
Summary
We have some simple introductory lessons to basic Chinese where you can see the characters in use.
Sound files kindly provided by shtooka.net ➚ under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License