6 Ways of Forming Chinese Characters

Did you know there are only 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

Yes, 6 kinds of Chinese characters make up the 50,000 Chinese characters in existence today.

Amazing isnt it?

It shows that there is a logical symbol system used to create Chinese characters. That they are not just made up of random lines and strokes.

Once you know these 6 types of Chinese characters, youll find that learning Chinese writing isnt so difficult after all.

Oh, one more thing

The radicals

No, these have nothing to do with extremists or terrorists.:)

They are the "root elements" of Chinese characters. The meaning part of Chinese characters. There are 214 of them and they exist independently or as part of complex characters.

Once you get a general idea of the common radicals, you can guess the meaning of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese dictionaries are organized by radicals starting with one-stroke radicals, two, three and so on, and hanyu pinyin, the modern Chinese Romanization system.

By knowing the radicals and the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters, one can pretty much guess the meaning and sound of Chinese characters.

So, what are the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

The earliest Chinese characters some 4,000 years ago were shaped like the things they represented. Known as "pictographs", these were pictures of humans, animals and natural objects, like "sun", "mother", "bird", "food" etc.

There are only 300 plus pictographs but they form the building blocks of modern Chinese writing.

To create more words, symbols were added to pictographs to form "ideographs". For example, by adding a horizontal stroke, "wood" became "root", and "mouth" became "sweet".

Later, two or more pictographs were combined to form "composite ideographs". These are "meaning plus meaning" words. For example, "man" 人 added to "tree" 木 forms the Chinese character "rest" 休 -- a man leaning against a tree. And three characters for "wood" 木 together make a "forest" 森.

This way of forming Chinese characters shows the creativity of the ancient Chinese, but it could not produce a lot of Chinese characters easily.

"Borrowed characters" came into being. This means a Chinese character with the same sound as another was borowed to form new characters with no regard for its meaning.

The result? New characters with the same sound but different meanings were formed. For example, the Chinese character for "north" 北 showed two people "back to back" and originally meant just that. The original character 北 was borrowed to represent a direction, while the sound remained unchanged.

But what happened to the original meanings of these borrowed characters? In order to retain their original meanings, a meaning component was added to the sound component. So using the same example, the character meaning "back to back" was given a "flesh" component 背 so it could keep its original meaning.

As a result, "sound plus meaning" words or phonetic compounds were formed. These are Chinese characters with a sound part and a meaning part. Today, this type of Chinese characters make up 80% of Chinese characters in use.

The last type of Chinese characters is called Transferred characters.

Transferred characters share the same radical and have the same meaning but their pronunciations are different. This is the least important of the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters.

So early Chinese characters were created based on meaning alone and started from pictures.

Eventually, each Chinese character became a unit of sound and meaning like what we have today.

But it remains possible to guess the meaning of Chinese characters from the meaning component, the radicals.

Want to learn Chinese for pleasure and profit in less time? Like to creatively enhance your life with Chinese characters and symbols? Liow Kah Joon is your guide. Sign up for his free Chinese Symbols ezine at Living Chinese Symbols.

How is Learning Chinese Writing Different From Learning a Western Language?
In the modern Chinese writing system, each character is a form of its own, representing a particular sound and at least one meaning.In other words, each Chinese symbol is a unity of form, sound and meaning.To learn Chinese writing, you need to know e...

Several Drawbacks of Chinese Writing System
As faster and faster development of chinas economy, more and more foreigners are going to learn Chinese language; this makes Chinese people proud, even to the extent that some people are considering whether they should learn English. It seems a good ...

Where is the Chinese Alphabet?
In any single month, more than 10,000 people search for the Chinese alphabet on the internet.Question is:Does the Chinese language have an alphabet?If so, where is it?Why dont I see it?To answer the above questions, lets look at how Chinese writing e...

Ten Reasons To Learn Chinese
1. Chinese, is one of the Sino-Tibetan languages, or more accurately it is a group of different dialects of which Mandarin (Putonghua) is one. Taken together there are more native speakers of Chinese than any other language. To put this in perspectiv...

Trust in Chinese Society
In China, trust is important for successful business ventures. Usually trust will be placed in persons that you have known for a long time, such as family members or schoolmates. These are people that you have grown up to trust and who have proven th...

One Basic Factor that Hinder Chinese People in Learning English
Chinese people, especially students encounter great difficulties when they learn English. Today, English is being taught at nearly all schools and universities, and students learn English at younger and younger ages. Many students or non-students lea...

The Challenge of Learning the Chinese Language
Chinese is a language, or a group of languages, spoken by 1.3 billion people worldwide. If you believe Chinese to be one language, rather than a grouping, it is the single most commonly spoken language on the planet. It is spoken in countries like Ch...

Three Simple Steps To Learn Chinese
When you get older, you soon start to realize that learning to speak different languages can come in extremely useful. It could be that you have people from another country working with you and you need to learn the language in order to easily commun...

Raising Prices Make Plastics Import From China Difficult For European And Us Manufacturers
Over the past few years, Chinese manufacturers of plastic resins and rubbers have been extremely successful in exporting their products into Europe. This happened for a number of reasons such as the improved processing technology adopted by Chinese c...

Is Japanese Language Difficult to Learn?
The answer is yes and no. Yes, because, first of all, the Japanese language has a few sounds with five standard vowels and simple pronunciation scheme; syllables are formed by a single vowel or a consonant-vowel combination. For the grammar, there ar...