The pronunciation of each character is therefore a combination of a syllable and a tone. There are only a small number of available syllables in Chinese, and many characters therefore share the same syllable—in fact many characters share the same sound plus tone combination. They are like the English words “here” and “hear”—when they are spoken, you can only tell which is which from the context or by seeing the word in written form.
Apart from putonghua (modern standard Chinese), another well-known type of Chinese is Cantonese, which is spoken in southern China and in many Chinese communities around the world. In fact there are several dozen different Chinese languages, and the pronunciations of Chinese characters in these languages are all very different from each other. But the important thing to realize is that the characters themselves do not change. So two Chinese people who can’t understand each other when they’re talking together, can write to one another without any problem at all!
Simplified and traditional characters
As more and more characters were introduced over the years by combining existing characters, some of them became quite complicated. Writing them required many strokes which was time-consuming, and it became difficult to distinguish some of them, especially when the writing was small. So when writing the characters quickly in hand-written form, many people developed short-cuts and wrote them in a more simplified form. In the middle of the 20 th century, the Chinese decided to create a standardised set of simplified characters to be used by everyone in China. This resulted in many of the more complicated characters being given simplified forms, making them much easier to learn and to write. Today in China, and also in Singapore, these simplified characters are used almost exclusively, and many Chinese no longer learn the old traditional forms. However the full traditional forms continue to be used in Taiwan and in overseas Chinese communities around the world.
Here are some examples of how some characters were simplified:
Modern standard Chinese uses only simplified characters. But it is useful to be able to recognize the traditional forms as they are still used in many places outside China, and of course older books and inscriptions were also written using the traditional forms. This workbook teaches the full traditional forms. If there is a simplified form, then it is shown in a separate box on the right-hand side of the page so that you can see what it looks like.
How is Chinese written?
Chinese was traditionally written from top to bottom in columns beginning on the right-hand side of the page and working towards the left, like this:
This means that for a book printed in this way, you start by opening it at (what Westerners would think of as) the back cover. While writing in columns is sometimes considered archaic, you will still find many books, especially novels and more serious works of history, printed in this way.
Nowadays, though, most Chinese people write from left to right in horizontal lines working from the top of a page to the bottom, just as we do in English.
Are Chinese characters the same as English words?
Although each character has a meaning, it’s not really true that an individual character is equivalent to an English “word”. Each character is actually only a single syllable. In Chinese (like in English) some words are just one syllable, but most words are made up of two or more syllables joined together. The vast majority of words in Chinese actually consist of two separate characters placed together in a pair. These multi-syllable words are often referred to as “compounds”, and this workbook provides a list of common compounds for each character.
Some Chinese characters are one-syllable words on their own (like the English words “if” and “you”), while other characters are only ever used as one half of a word (like the English syllables “sen” and “tence”). Some characters do both: they’re like the English “light” which is happy as a word on its own, but which also links up to form words like “headlight” or “lighthouse”.
The Chinese write sentences by stringing characters together in a long line from left to right (or in a column from top to bottom), with equal-sized spaces between each character. If English were written this way—as individual syllables rather than as words that are joined together—it would mean all the syllables would be written separately with spaces in between them, something like this:
If you can un der stand this sen tence you can read Chi nese too.
So in theory, you can’t see which characters are paired together to form words, but in practice, once you know a bit of Chinese, you can!
Punctuation was not traditionally used when writing Chinese, but today commas, periods (full stops), quotation marks, and exclamation points are all used along with other types of punctuation which have been borrowed from English.
Two ways of putting characters together
We have looked at combining characters together to make new characters, and pairing characters together to make words. So what’s the difference?
Well, when two simple characters are combined to form a new complex character, they are squashed or distorted so that the new character fits into the same size square as the original characters. The meaning of the new character may be related to the meaning of its components, but it frequently appears to have no connection with them at all! The new complex character also has a new single-syllable pronunciation, which may or may not be related to the pronunciation of one of its parts. For example:
On the other hand, when characters are paired together to create words, the characters are simply written one after the other, normal sized, with a normal space in between (and there are no hyphens or anything to show that these characters are working together as a pair). The resulting word has a pronunciation which is two syllables—it is simply the pronunciations of the two individual characters one after the other. Also, you’re much more likely to be able to guess the meaning of the word from the meanings of the individual characters that make it up. For example:
Is it necessary to learn words as well as characters?
As we’ve said, the meaning of a compound word is often related to the meanings of the individual characters. But this is not always the case, and sometimes the word takes on a new and very specific meaning. So to be able to read Chinese sentences and understand what they mean, it isn’t enough just to learn individual character—you’ll also need to learn words. (In fact, many individual characters have very little meaning at all by themselves, and only take on meanings when paired with other characters).
Here are some examples of common Chinese words where the meaning of the overall word is not what you might expect from the meanings of the individual characters:
If you think about it, the same thing happens in English. If you know what “battle” and “ship” mean, you can probably guess what a “battleship” might be. But this wouldn’t work with “championship”! Similarly, you’d be unlikely to guess the meaning
