Over two thousand of the nearly four thousand collected single characters from these bronze objects are now understood. Over one thousand of the over four thousand characters inscribed on excavated oracle bones have been deciphered.īronze Inscriptions are the characters inscribed on bronze objects, such as ritual wine vessels, made during the Shang (1600 – 1046 B.C.) and Zhou (1046 – 256 B.C.) dynasties. Because Oracle Bone inscriptions mainly recorded the art of divination, this script is also called bu ci (卜辭), divination writings. This is the earliest form of Chinese characters. Oracle Bone Inscriptions refers to the writings inscribed on the carapaces of tortoises and mammals during the Shang Dynasty (1600 – 1046 B.C.). The evolution of the Chinese character for dragon ( long 龍) is illustrated below: The main forms are: Oracle Bone Inscriptions ( Jia Gu Wen 甲骨文), Bronze Inscriptions, ( Jin Wen 金文), Small Seal Characters ( Xiao Zhuan 小篆), Official Script ( Li Shu 隸書), Regular Script ( Kai Shu 楷書), Cursive Writing or Grass Stroke Characters ( Cao Shu 草書), and Freehand Cursive ( Xing Shu 行書). Studies from China have shown that 90% of Chinese newspapers and magazines tend to use 3,500 basic characters.Ĭhinese characters have evolved over several thousands of years to include many different styles, or scripts. There are 47,035 Chinese characters in the Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), the standard national dictionary developed during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, but the precise quantity of Chinese characters is a mystery numerous, rare variants have accumulated throughout history. As an art form, Chinese calligraphy remains an integral aspect of Chinese culture. Nearly one-fourth of the world’s population still use Chinese characters today. It often helps to look at the traditional version to see the origins of a character.įor example, the simplified character 东 (dōng) meaning ‘east’ doesn’t really help us find meaning, whereas looking at the traditional character, 東 will help you deduce meaning and create a story.Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi (漢字) are one of the earliest forms of written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. When I say ‘meaning,’ there are times when this will only be a mere hint, and the origins of these characters (depending on the person) may need to be studied in more detail in order to understand it fully. Radicals generally provide you with the ‘meaning’ of a character, or sometimes the pronunciation. Still, once you have learned around one-quarter of these radicals, you might want to continue learning the remainder simultaneously with the characters in the step below. There are approximately 214 radicals in Chinese, which may seem a lot. Learning radicals is probably the next best step because after learning the pictographs, characters begin to get bigger and slightly more complex, but NOT impossible! No, not the revolutionary type, the ones that we like to call the ‘building-blocks’ of Chinese characters. Of course, you can learn radicals first, but pictographs are an excellent ‘unscary’ introduction to Chinese characters that served me well! LEARN RADICALSĪ significant step of learning to read Chinese characters is to understand radicals. The reason why I recommend learning pictographs first is that many of them are also radicals, which you also need to know. You can get started learning pictographs in ‘ Learn to Read with these 20 Chinese Pictographs’. Well, that’s the reaction I had anyway, and the realization that Chinese characters had a meaning that I could actually understand was one of the reasons why I stuck with learning to read Chinese. I had no intention of learning to read Chinese characters because back then, written Chinese looked like this: Let me take you back to 2011 when I first arrived in China. After all, they are ‘simplified.’ However, don’t forget to take a look at traditional characters, especially later down the line. The chances are that you’ll automatically choose to learn simplified characters since this is the written language used in mainland China. There are plenty of avenues to go down before being able to read, and below are some of the ‘stages’ you might want to visit while learning to read Chinese characters.īefore starting to read, you need to decide whether you’ll learn to read simplified or traditional Chinese characters. Of course, no one’s suggesting it’s an ‘easy’ journey. Once I got over the idea that learning to read Chinese was impossible, I realized how much easier my life had become in China, and how liberating it was to read even just a handful of Chinese characters. I was one of those ‘students’ if I can even call myself that, who started to learn Chinese out of necessity. Learning to read Chinese characters is something that many students of Chinese, who often just begin learning to speak, are reluctant to show interest in.
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