The Basics About Chinese Characters

There are over 80,000 Chinese characters, but most of them are seldom used today. So how many Chinese characters do you need to know? For basic reading and writing of modern Chinese, you only need a few thousands. Here are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters:

Most frequently used 1,000 characters: ~90% (Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 2,500 characters: 98.0% (Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 3,500 characters: 99.5% (Coverage rate)

For an English word, the Chinese translation (or the Chinese 'word') often consists of two or more Chinese characters. You should use them together and read them from left to right. If you want to arrange them vertically, the one on the leftmost should go to the top. See an example for the word 'English' below:
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/G/english8.gif[/img]

As you can see, there are two Chinese characters for English (the language), which are ying1 yu3 in Pinyin. Pinyin is the international standard romanization scheme for Chinese characters, which is useful for learning the phonetics of Mandarin. There are four tones in Pinyin and we use the numbers here, i.e., 1, 2, 3, and 4, to depict the four tones. If you want to learn Mandarin (or Pu3 Tong1 Hua4), you have to master the four tones of the language. However, one pinyin usually represents many Chinese characters. For example, han4 can depict the Chinese characters for sweet, drought, brave, Chinese, etc. Thus you have to learn the Chinese characters to master the language.

Chinese is not alphabetic so the writing is not related to its phonetics. We don't translate the Western alphabet since the letters have no meaning, and we do use the letters in writings, especially in scientific writings.

There are many styles of Chinese writing. Some of the styles are more ancient than others. In general, there are large differences among the styles, even though some of the styles are quite close. Different styles of Chinese characters are naturally used according to the purposes of the writing, such as Xiaozhuan mainly used for seal carving now. Besides the different styles, there are also two forms of Chinese characters, the simplified and the traditional. The simplified is the standard writing form employed in the mainland of China and the traditional form is mainly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There are total 2,235 simplified characters contained in the 'Simplified Character Table' published in 1964 by the Chinese government, so the majority of the Chinese characters are the same in the two forms, though the count of commonly-used Chinese characters is only about 3,500.

All the Chinese characters on our site are Kaiti (the standard style) in the simplified form.

Japanese Kanji are originally from China so most of them are the same as their corresponding Chinese characters, but Japanese kanji only contain a small collection of Chinese characters. There are a lot more Chinese characters not included in Japanese Kanji. Kanji are used less and less now in Japan. You don't see a lot of Kanji in a modern Japanese book anymore.

Chinese Dialects

There are many Chinese dialects in China. It is hard to guess how many dialects exist, but they can be roughly classified into one of the seven large groups, i.e., Putonghua (Mandarin), Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Min, Wu, Xiang and Yue (Cantonese). Each language group contains a large number of dialects. These are the Chinese languages spoken mostly by the Han people, which represents about 92 percent of the total population. We will not get into the non-Chinese languages spoken by the minorities here, such as Tibetan, Mongolian and Miao.
The dialects from the seven groups are quite different. For example, a Mandarin speaker in northern China usually understands little Cantonese, but a non-Mandarin speaker usually can speak some Mandarin with a strong accent.

This is largely because Mandarin has been the official national language since 1913. Mandarin or Putonghua is mainly based on the Beijing dialect. Despite the large differences among Chinese dialects, there is one thing in common for them -- they all share the same writing system based on Chinese characters.
A distinguishing feature of the Chinese languages is tonal. Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has more than four tones

Guide Picks - Top 10 Lucky Symbols  

Chinese characters usually have one or more meanings and some of them are particularly loved by Chinese people. Here is the top ten list of the lucky ones. Please note Pinyin is also used here, which is the Chinese spelling system for the characters. For example, fu is the pinyin for good luck in Chinese. But fu is only the phonic part of the character and it also represents other Chinese characters that sound the same.  

1.) Fu - Blessing, Good Fortune, Good Luck
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/U/c/4/fu3.gif[/img] Fu is one of the most popular Chinese characters used in Chinese New Year. It is often posted upside down on the front door of a house or an apartment. The upside down fu means good luck came since the character for upsite down in Chinese sounds the same as the character for came.

2.) Lu - Prosperity
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/-/c/4/lu4.gif[/img]It used to mean official's salary in feudal China. Fengshui is believed to be the Chinese way to health, wealth and happiness. If you are interested in Fengshui, you may check out the book 'The Feng Shui Kit.'

3.) Shou - Longevity
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/Z/c/4/shou4.gif[/img]Shou also means life, age or birthday.

4.) Xi - Happiness
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/W/c/4/xi3.gif[/img]Double happiness is usually posted everywhere on Chinese weddings.

5.) Cai - wealth, money
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/T/c/4/cai2.gif[/img] Chinese often say money can make a ghost turn a millstone. It is to say money really can do a lot of things.

6.) He - harmonious
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/V/c/4/he2.gif[/img] 'People harmony' is an important part of Chinese culture. When you have harmonious relations with others, things will be a lot easier for you.

7.) Ai - love, affection
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/S/c/4/ai4.gif[/img] Don't need to say any more about this one. Just want to point out ai is often used with 'mianzi' together. Aimianzi means 'be concerned about one's face-saving.'     


8.) Mei - beautiful, pretty
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/Y/c/4/mei3.gif[/img]The United States of American is called Mei Guo in the short form. Guo means country so Meiguo is a good name.

9.) Ji - lucky, auspicious, propitious
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/X/c/4/ji2.gif[/img] Hope all is well.

10.) De - virtue, moral
[img]http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/_/c/4/de2.gif[/img] De means virtue, moral, heart, mind, and kindness, etc. It is also used in the name for Germany, i.e., De Guo.