Learn Chinese - Chinese Language

Characters

Although many Chinese dialects exist, the written language is a common form of communication.
Written Chinese employs Chinese characters, which are logograms: each symbol represents a semanteme or morpheme (a meaningful unit of language), as well as one syllable; the written language can thus be termed a morpheme-syllabic script.
Chinese characters evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as 人 (human), 日 (sun), 山 (mountain), 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary, which indicate what the character is about semantically.
There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the PRC (Mainland China) in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu (cursive script) shorthand variants. The simplified characters are commonly used and learned while calligraphy artists tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. The vast majority of characters are written versions of spoken sounds that have meaning. A large dictionary usually contains 40,000 characters. One must be able to recognize 2,000 to 3,000 characters to read a newspaper.

Itroduction to Chinese Characters

Basic Chinese character strokes

Chinese Calligraphy

Chinese language