Some possible ways to learn Chinese characters

Most characters are built of components which represent physical things or abstract concepts. Learn what each of the components represents and try building up mental images featuring the components for each character. Include in your mental images the meanings of the characters and the pronunciation.

There are a number of books, such as Fun with Chinese Characters, which explain the structure and meaning of each character with illustrations and little stories.

When learning Japanese remember that most kanji have several different readings: usually at least one derived from Chinese and one that is the Japanese word with the same meaning. Japanese children learn the Japanese readings of the kanji first and later learn the Chinese-derived readings. This is probably a good technique to adopt, unless you know Chinese already.

Learn the correct way to write each character and if possible, take a class in Chinese or Japanese calligraphy.

Practice reading and writing characters at every opportunity.

Make some character cards with a single large character on the front and the character’s pronunciation and meaning together with words and/or phrases featuring the character on the back. Carry these cards around with you and refer to them whenever you have a moment. Some Chinese language courses include character cards like this.

As you learn more characters, you will start to notice recurring themes and patterns. This will help you to guess the meanings of new characters. The more characters you learn, the easier it will become to learn new ones.

To avoid eyestrain when poring over Chinese or Japanese texts, dictionaries, etc, make sure your study area is well-lit and consider buying a large magnifying glass. I’m serious – when I start learning Chinese and Japanese I had perfect eyesight. After studying them for four years I needed glasses.

Introduction to Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are all in square block shape like this one: 口 (meaning ‘mouth’). Simple or complicated, they all take the same area on paper. To write Chinese, you should know 3 things to get ready:

1. Strokes

A stroke is a single brush of pen on the paper. All Chinese characters are made of one or more strokes such as the character: 一 (meaning ‘one’). There are dozens of simple strokes which will be discussed in detail in Class 6. Please also remember that every stroke should be written in a specific way. For example, the horizontal stroke in character “一” has to been written from left to right.

2. Radicals

Radicals are the basic component of Chinese characters. Think of Chinese characters as molecules like water or salt and then the radicals as equivalents to element atoms such as sodium, hydrogen, or oxygen. The analogy can be demonstrated this way:

Chinese characters – > molecules such as water, salt, sugar

Radicals – > atoms such as sodium, hydrogen, or carbon

Stroke – > subatomic particles such as proton, neutron, or electron

Just like Chemical elements, many radicals can make single characters by themselves. The character口 (mouth), for example, is frequently used as radicals in characters related to mouth such as 唱, meaning ‘sing’.

Radicals are very important to the meaning and writing of Chinese characters. Here are two examples. First example, 男 means “man”. It is made up of 2 radicals vertically. The upper part is 田, meaning farm land and the lower part is 力, meaning labor or force. Therefore, it is easy to remember the character because the labor at the land is often male people. Another example: the character 林means “forest”. Since 木 means wood, it should seem obvious that doubling wood would make a forest.

There are about 200 radicals in Chinese characters. Learning them all is a natural process that will not take too long.

3. Stroke and Radical orders

There is a certain order to write strokes and radicals in a Chinese character. The general rule is from above to below, from outside to inside, and from left to right.

About Chinese character

A Chinese character, also known as a Han character (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字; pinyin: Hànzì), is a logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), less frequently Korean (hanja), and formerly Vietnamese (hán tự).

The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China have shown that full literacy in the Chinese language requires a knowledge of only between three and four thousand characters.^[1]

In the Chinese writing system, the characters are morphosyllabic, each usually corresponding to a spoken syllable with a basic meaning. However, although Chinese words may be formed by characters with basic meanings, a majority of words in Mandarin Chinese require two or more characters to write (thus are poly-syllabic) but have meaning that is distinct from the characters they are made from.^[2] Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character. In addition, many Chinese characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. Chinese characters are also the world’s longest continuously used writing system.^{[citation needed]}

Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography. Non-Chinese languages which have adopted sinography—and, with the orthography, a large number of loanwords from the Chinese language—are known as Sinoxenic languages, whether or not they still use the characters. The term does not imply any genetic affiliation with Chinese. The major Sinoxenic languages are Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.