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Chinese has no alphabet, but uses pictograms to represent words and concepts. Learn how to pronounce the Chinese characters with Pinyin, a system of romanization, and listen to audio examples.
- Colors in Chinese
The table below contains a list of the Chinese colors with...
- Animals in Chinese
The table below contains a list of the Chinese animals with...
- Learn Chinese
Chinese is the official language of over 1,1 billion people...
- Chinese Numbers
Chinese Ordinal numbers tell the order of things in a set:...
- Colors in Chinese
Learn about the history, structure and pronunciation of Chinese letters, also known as Chinese characters. Find a chart of over 50,000 characters in alphabetical order based on the Pinyin system.
Chinese characters are logographs, graphemes that denote units of meaning in a language like words or morphemes. Writing systems that use logographs are contrasted with alphabets and syllabaries, where graphemes correspond to the phonetic units in a language.
- What Are Chinese Characters?
- Chinese “Alphabet”: A Little History
- How Do Modern Chinese Characters Work?
- Chinese Radicals and Phonetic Elements
- Making Chinese Words with Characters
- Reform of The Chinese “Alphabet” in The 1950s
- How Do Children Learn to Write The Chinese Alphabet?
- What Is Pinyin?
- How Can You Learn Chinese Characters?
- Do You Have to Learn Chinese Characters?
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Nowadays, we see Chinese writing everywhere. We see it in sports stadiums and on football shirts, on shipping containers and on lorries, in online ads and on the news when we watch tv. But what do all those strange symbols mean? And how do they work? The title of this post is actually slightly misleading because Chinese has no ‘alphabet’. Chinese d...
The history of Chinese characters is an immensely fascinating subject. But here we can only scratch the surface. However, it's still useful to understand a bit about where Chinese characters come from and how they have developed. The Chinese writing system is among the world’s most ancient. The precursors of modern Chinese characters have been disc...
Although these examples display an undeniably elegant logic, that doesn’t mean it’s possible to somehow ‘decipher’ a character you’ve never seen before. One of the major differences between Chinese writing and a system based on an alphabet is that if you haven’t learnt a character, there’s no way of reading it. If you haven’t met a character before...
Chinese characters are not made up of random lines and squiggles – their different parts are derived from other characters, and most parts have meanings. For example, you'll notice that 你 (nĭ, ‘you’) and 他 (tā, ‘he’) both contain 亻. This is not a character in itself; it’s a version of 人 that is used in other characters. And it’s no coincidence that...
So far, I’ve talked mainly about individual characters. But it’s important to realise that in modern Chinese, many words are polysyllabic and are made up of combinations of individual characters. For example, take the character 林. Earlier, I said this character means ‘forest’, but you can’t use it on its own. If you want to say ‘forest’ in a senten...
There’s one event in the history of Chinese characters that you need to know about. And that’s the reform of 1956. In that year, the communist government of China decided to simplify around 2,000 of the most common characters to make them easier to learn and boost levels of literacy. However, since these reforms only took place in mainland China, C...
Now we know something about how Chinese characters work, it’s time to talk about learning them. So how do Chinese children do it? The short answer is, by starting young and spending lots of time practising! Since there are far more characters to learn than there are letters in our alphabet, it takes much longer for Chinese children to become litera...
Throughout this post, the pronunciation of the characters has been given next to them in Roman letters with some funny-looking accents. This is pinyin, and it will become a familiar friend as you take your first steps into the world of Chinese language learning. In Chinese, 拼音pīnyīn simply means ‘phonetic’, and it’s the official form of Romanisatio...
Although your first lessons will make extensive use of pinyin, as early as possible, you'll also start learning Chinese characters. So how can you do it? As somebody learning Chinese as a foreign language, you'll employ many of the same techniques as Chinese children. And there’s no avoiding the fact that if you want to learn to read and write Chin...
When I was talking about pinyin, a couple of thoughts might have occurred to you. First, if Chinese children start by learning to write their language in Roman letters, why do they persist in using such a devilishly difficult script when a much easier alternative exists? And second, if you can read and write Chinese in pinyin, do you, as a learner,...
Learn how Chinese characters work, where they come from and why you need to learn them. Discover the history, logic and structure of the Chinese writing system and how to use radicals and phonetic elements to decode words.
Chinese does not have an alphabet, but uses pinyin, a system that uses the Latin alphabet to represent the sounds of Mandarin Chinese. Learn how to pronounce Chinese words with pinyin, and explore the history and features of Chinese characters.
Chinese has no alphabet, but it has a form of phonetic system to help with pronunciation. Learn the difference between pinyin and zhuyin, and how to use them to write and speak Chinese words.
Oct 19, 2021 · Chinese characters are composed of distinct building blocks called radicals that form a logical structure. Learn how to read and write characters with the most common radicals, stroke order, and story method.
