The First 100 Chinese Characters: Traditional Character Edition. Laurence Matthews
• how the characters developed;
• the difference between traditional and simplified forms of the characters;
• what the “radicals” are and why they’re useful;
• how to count the writing strokes used to form each character;
• how to look up the characters in a dictionary;
• how words are created by joining two characters together; and, most importantly;
• how to write the characters!
Also, in case you’re using this book on your own without a teacher, we’ll tell you how to get the most out of using it.
Chinese characters are not nearly as strange and complicated as people seem to think. They’re actually no more mysterious than musical notation, which most people can master in only a few months. So there’s really nothing to be scared of or worried about: everyone can learn them—it just requires a bit of patience and perseverance. There are also some things which you may have heard about writing Chinese characters that aren’t true. In particular, you don’t need to use a special brush to write them (a ball-point pen is fine), and you don’t need to be good at drawing (in fact you don’t even need to have neat handwriting, although it helps!).
How many characters are there?
Thousands! You would probably need to know something like two thousand to be able to read Chinese newspapers and books, but you don’t need anything like that number to read a menu, go shopping or read simple street signs and instructions. Just as you can get by in most countries knowing about a hundred words of the local language, so too you can get by in China quite well knowing a hundred common Chinese characters. And this would also be an excellent basis for learning to read and write Chinese.
How did the characters originally develop?
Chinese characters started out as pictures representing simple objects, and the first characters originally resembled the things they represented. For example:
Some other simple characters were pictures of “ideas”:
Some of these characters kept this “pictographic” or “ideographic” quality about them, but others were gradually modified or abbreviated until many of them now look nothing like the original objects or ideas.
Then, as words were needed for things which weren’t easy to draw, existing characters were “combined” to create new characters. For example, 女 (meaning “woman”) combined with 子 (meaning “child”) gives a new character 好 (which means “good” or “to be fond of ”).
Notice that when two characters are joined together like this to form a new character, they get squashed together and deformed slightly. This is so that the new, combined character will fit into the same size square or “box” as each of the original two characters. For example the character 曰 “sun” becomes thinner when it is the left-hand part of the character 時 “time”; and it becomes shorter when it is the upper part of the character 星 “star”. Some components got distorted and deformed even more than this in the combining process: for example when the character 人 “man” appears on the left-hand side of a complex character it gets compressed into イ, like in the character 他 “he”.
So you can see that some of the simpler characters often act as basic “building blocks” from which more complex characters are formed. This means that if you learn how to write these simple characters you’ll also be learning how to write some complex ones too.
How are characters read and pronounced?
The pronunciations in this workbook refer to modern standard Chinese. This is the official language of China and is also known as “Mandarin” or “putonghua”.
The pronunciation of Chinese characters is written out with letters of the alphabet using a romanization system called “Hanyu Pinyin”—or “pinyin” for short. This is the modern system used in China. In pinyin some of the letters have a different sound than in English—but if you are learning Chinese you’ll already know this. We could give a description here of how to pronounce each sound, but it would take up a lot of space—and this workbook is about writing the characters, not pronouncing them! In any case, you really need to hear a teacher (or recording) pronounce the sounds out loud to get an accurate idea of what they sound like.
Each Chinese character is pronounced using only one syllable. However, in addition to the syllable, each character also has a particular tone, which refers to how the pitch of the voice is used. In standard Chinese there are four different tones, and in pinyin the tone is marked by placing an accent mark over the vowel as follows:
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.