Chinese Characters - Construction Principles of Chinese Characters, continued

Part 5: Construction Principles of Chinese Characters, continued 

 

Principle 4 - The Sound-plus-Meaning Compound Character 

Two characters join to create a new one. One character influences the sound of the word; the other influences its meaning. 

Again, over time, some of these sound influences have blurred a bit, but they're usually pretty close.

Most characters in use today are these sound-plus-meaning compounds, or "pictophonics." 

Principle 5 - The Meaning-plus-Meaning Compound Character 

Here the interaction of the meanings of two characters combined produces the meaning of the new character.

Principle 6 - The Reclarified Compound Character

When one written form had come to represent various meanings or spoken words, scholars would sometimes "reclarify" one of the meanings by adding some new part to show they meant one thing by writing the character and not another.

ILLUSTRATION

 

In the "clock" and "tree/forest/full of trees" examples, you may have noticed that as characters are added together, each one has to take up less space than if it were standing alone. This is because each Chinese character, no matter how many sub-elements it contains, must take up about the same amount of space as any other character.

In other words, each one must be written in a box that is no larger and no smaller than boxes for other characters.

Notice again how the character for “field,” 田 (tián), shrinks as it is added together with other elements in new characters, so that each character “fits in the box."

Copied from http://www.chinese-outpost.com

Chinese Characters - Construction Principles of Chinese Characters

Part 4: Construction Principles of Chinese Characters

 

It starts to get pretty deep here, actually. You might want to take a tea break and a quick stroll around the neighborhood before continuing.

In Part 2, we learned the principles governing the stroke order for Chinese characters. Another way of defining characters involves "principles of construction." In this scheme, there are six types of characters, with each type finding its meaning based on one of the following principles.

Principle 1 - The Picture Character


Picture characters are simply meant to look like the things they represent. As we mentioned before, though, many pictograms evolved over time so that the resemblance is less than obvious.

NOTE

Chinese characters are often combined to create larger, more complex characters.

This means that learning 2,000 characters in order to be "literate" doesn't mean learning 2,000 unrelated forms. Instead, you will learn a smaller number of basic, independent forms, then move on to more complicated characters that contain more than one basic character.

The example below uses colors to highlight the various "smaller" characters which combine to create the character for "clock."

Note that each of these smaller parts already means something else when standing alone.

EXAMPLE

 

One of my favorites:

This means "tree":木 (mù). Two trees together means "forest": 林 (lín).

A third tree on top means "full of trees": 森 (sēn).

Principle 2 - The Symbol Character 

Symbol characters symbolize (what else!?) an idea or concept. Below, in the character meaning above, the vertical line and small stroke are above the horizontal line. In the character meaning below, they are underneath. 

Principle 3 - The Borrowed Sound Character  

Also called Sound-Loan characters, these borrow the same written form and sound of another character, but have unrelated meanings. 

  
HUH? 
You might compare Sound Loan characters to this bit of silliness:

Slightly Adapted from http://www.chinese-outpost.com

Chinese Characters - Number of Strokes in Chinese Characters

Part 3: Number of Strokes in Chinese Characters

Knowing the number of strokes used to make each character is important, especially when it comes to looking them up in a dictionary, as you'll read about in Part 7. 

Characters themselves vary in number of strokes from one to thirty. 

And does it frighten you to know that there are over 20,000 Chinese characters to choose from? It did me when I first heard that. But fear not: Even knowing just the most commonly used 2,000 will more than make you functionally literate.

The following illustration shows a random example for each number of strokes. See if you can count them all.

NOTE

Have you ever wondered how Chinese characters first came into being as a writing form, or who wrote the first Chinese character?

Sorry, probably no one has the definitive answers to those questions, but here's a page that comes pretty close. 

Copied from http://www.chinese-outpost.com

Chinese Characters - Stroke Order for Chinese Characters

Part 2: Stroke Order for Chinese Characters

When you were learning to write your name, you were probably taught to write the letters in a certain order and direction. That's because it is more efficient to write western languages from left to right. For similar reasons, the strokes for each Chinese character are to be drawn in a certain defined order. 

At first you may need help from a teacher, book, or other learning aid to determine the stroke order for characters you encounter. The more characters you become familiar with, however, the easier it becomes to see which principle applies to a given character.

TIP

The best resource I have found on the web for illustrating stroke order and direction for individual characters is located here. You can even download this animation package presented by the University of Southern California for viewing on your own computer.

You'll find another page showing stroke order animations for various characters on Dr. Tianwei Xie's UC Davis site here.

In short, learning these following seven principles of stroke order will ultimately save you from having to memorize rules character by character.

Copied from http://www.chinese-outpost.com/

Chinese Characters - Basic Strokes of Chinese Characters

Part 1: Basic Strokes of Chinese Characters

A good first step in making Chinese characters less intimidating is identifying their most basic parts.

A number of unique, identifiable strokes (individual marks of the brush or pen) are used to write Chinese. 

The chart below shows you the eleven most common strokes, giving the name and direction in which each should be drawn. 

In these examples, they are colored red (and very big!) to help you pick them out. 

 

NOTE 

Did you know that the name of China's capital, Beijing, or 北京 (bĕi jīng), means "North Capital?" It's true. And the Chinese city Nanjing, or 南京 (nán jīng), means "South Capital."

東京 (dōng jīng), or "East Capital," is actually in Japan. Most people know it by its Japanese pronunciation: "Tokyo."

And as for "West Capital," I don't believe there is a city called Xijing, or 西京 (xī jīng). But I think we need one. Therefore, I would like to nominate Seattle for a name change.

Seattle is commonly translated as 西雅圖 (xī yă tú), just to get something that sounds like the name "Seattle," though 西雅圖 (xī yă tú) literally means "West Refined Picture," or maybe "West Elegant Graph."

I don't think this literal meaning is what the translators had in mind, but I rather like it: "West Refined Picture." Catchy! 

Copied from http://www.chinese-outpost.com