The First 100 Chinese Characters: Traditional Character Edition. Laurence Matthews
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 of “honeymoon” if you only knew the words “honey” and “moon”.
The good news is that learning compound words can help you to learn the characters. For example, you may know (from your Chinese lessons) that xīng qī means “week”. So when you see that this word is written 星期, you will know that 星 is pronounced xīng, and 期 is pronounced qī —even when these characters are forming part of other words. In fact, you will find that you remember many characters as half of some familiar word.
When you see a word written in characters, you can also often see how the word came to mean what it does. For example, xīng qī is 星期 which literally means “star period”. This will help you to remember both the word and the two individual characters.
What is a stroke count?
Each Chinese character is made up of a number of pen or brush strokes. Each individual stroke is the mark made by a pen or brush before lifting it off the paper to write the next stroke. Strokes come in various shapes and sizes—a stroke can be a straight line, a curve, a bent line, a line with a hook, or a dot. There is a traditional and very specific way that every character should be written. The order and direction of the strokes are both important if the character is to have the correct appearance.
What counts as a stroke is determined by tradition and is not always obvious. For example, the small box that often appears as part of a character (like the one on page 32, in the character 名) counts as three strokes, not four! (This is because a single stroke is traditionally used to write the top and right-hand sides of the box).
All this may sound rather pedantic but it is well worth learning how to write the characters correctly and with the correct number of strokes. One reason is that knowing how to count the strokes correctly is useful for looking up characters in dictionaries, as you’ll see later.
This book shows you how to write characters stroke by stroke, and once you get the feel of it you’ll very quickly learn how to work out the stroke count of a character you haven’t met before, and get it right!
What are radicals?
Although the earliest characters were simple drawings, most characters are complex with two or more parts. And you’ll find that some simple characters appear over and over again as parts of many complex characters. Have a look at these five characters:
All five of these characters have the same component on the left-hand side: 女, which means “woman”. This component gives a clue to the meaning of the character, and is called the “radical”. As you can see, most of these five characters have something to do with the idea of “woman”, but as you can also see, it’s not a totally reliable way of guessing the meaning of a character. (Meanings of characters are something you just have to learn, without much help from their component parts).
Unfortunately the radical isn’t always on the left-hand side of a character. Sometimes it’s on the right, or on the top, or on the bottom. Here are some examples:
