| In English we have 26 letters in the alphabet, in Russian we have 33 in the Cyrillic alphabet, but… There is no such thing as the Chinese Alphabet. Chinese is all about characters and we don’t put them together like we do with letters in our alphabets to make a word because these characters actually make up words themselves. Each character is one syllable. One character on its own can be a word, but many words are made up of two, three or even more characters put together. There is no Chinese Alphabet – just thousands upon thousands of characters.  The History of Chinese Characters/Chinese Alphabet The Chinese language is one of the oldest in the world. Unlike many languages, Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet and it’s not written as a series of letters, but rather as a series of pictures that have meaning and sounds. Historians have found ancient Chinese alphabet writing script that dates back over 3,000 years, however the modern writing script we recognize today, is around 2,000 years old and was developed during the Han Dynasty. Of course, like all languages, “Chinese alphabet” has evolved in the 2,000 years since the ‘clerical script’ was first created. The written characters have evolved into the written script for many different modern languages such as Cantonese (mother tongue in Hong Kong and Guangdong, China) and Kanji (Japanese characters). So, if there is no Chinese Alphabet, how do we start Learning Chinese? Good question and the answer is simple: We start learning the characters from the very beginning. As you start to take in your first 10, 20 Chinese characters you’ll start to realise these characters appear in many words, and some characters even have exactly the same sound. How can that be? Let’s try and explain without giving you too much of a 头疼 (tóu téng) that’s headache in Chinese by the way! Let’s take the most basic Chinese character: 一 (Yī – this means one) Great, we’ve learnt our first Chinese character. That means every time I see 一 it means that it’s one of something, right? Wrong. As there is no Chinese alphabet, characters can be joined together to make another word. The saving grace is that this does follow a logic generally. Let us explain: This is the character meaning common or general: 共 Gòng So, we’ve now learnt two Chinese characters but we are about to learn our third word, and that is simply by putting these two characters together to make 一共 (Yī Gòng). It means altogether. Kind of logical. This is the case in point for pretty much all of your Chinese studies, you put characters together that you have already learnt to make new words. So far, we have learnt two characters but actually know a total of three words. As you build your knowledge of Chinese characters you’ll see characters come together to make new vocabulary and you’ll get to the stage where you can make a strong educated guess as to what a word means even if you don’t know for sure. “How many letters are in the Chinese alphabet?” This is a question many people ask before starting out their Chinese studies. If you’ve read this far you’ll know that this question doesn’t have an answer due to the lack of a Chinese alphabet. To speak day to day Chinese you can cope quite comfortably with roughly 500-750 Chinese characters to your name. 2,000 Chinese characters – the number you need to read a newspaper 2,633 Chinese characters – the number of characters you should know to pass the HSK 6 exam 8,000 Chinese characters – the number an educated Chinese person will know 20,000 Chinese characters – the number a modern day Chinese dictionary would use These numbers above are large but they seem minute when we quote you these two figures: Let’s start with the Great Compendium of Chinese Characters, in Chinese the Hànyǔ dà zìdiǎn (汉语大字典). They quote that the number of existing Chinese characters is actually 54,648. The Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form, in Chinese the Zhōnghuá zì hǎi (中华字海) takes things to another level, however. This rather tame dictionary includes definitions for a mere 106,230 characters! |
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