Chinese characters Wikipedia. Unless otherwise specified, Chinese text in this article is written in the format Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese Pinyin. If the Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters are identical, they are written only once. For the species of moth known as Chinese Character, see Cilix glaucata. Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and some other Asian languages. In Standard Chinese, they are called hanzi simplified Chinese traditional Chinese, lit Han characters. They have been adapted to write a number of other languages, including Japanese, where they are known as kanji Korean, where they are known as hanja and Vietnamese, in a system known as ch Nm. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Learn Chinese Characters For Kids' title='Learn Chinese Characters For Kids' />Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, and historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Program Chomikuj. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,1. 36 are taught through secondary school the Jy kanji hundreds more are in everyday use. The characters used in Japan are distinct from those used in China in many respects. There are various national standard lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia the corresponding traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to a limited extent in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are written in post WWII Japan specific simplified forms shinjitai, which are closer to traditional forms than Chinese simplifications, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms kyjitai, which are virtually identical to Chinese traditional forms. In South Korea, when Chinese characters are used they are of the traditional variant and are almost identical to those used in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong. Teaching of Chinese characters in South Korea starts in the 7th grade and continues until the 1. In Old Chinese and Classical Chinese, which is based on it, most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese esp. Learn Chinese online with free Chinese lessons for both Mandarin and Cantonese. Learn Mandarin Chinese quickly and easily 40 online lessons with audio, including reading, speaking, writing, modern vocabulary, grammar, calligraphy, examples and. Learn Chinese. If youre trying to learn Chinese which is also called Mandarin, check our courses about adjectives, adverbs, articles, gender feminine, masculine. Mandarin Chinese, characters do not necessarily correspond to words indeed the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters because of the merging and loss of sounds in the Chinese language over time. Rather, a character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes written with two characters, bimorphemic syllables written with two characters and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase. Modern Chinese has many homophones thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on meaning. A single character may also have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings occasionally these correspond to different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. Learn to read and write Chinese Mandarin language online for free, by learning a Chinese character a day. Learn Chinese characters with innovative Chineseenglish dictionary, stroke order animations, online Chinese lessons and character writing worksheets. They typically have similar meanings, but often quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most significantly today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation e. Learn Chinese Characters' title='Learn Chinese Characters' />Japanese, and as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. FunctioneditWhen the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were generally monosyllabic, and each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day. It is estimated that about 2. Warring States period was polysyllabic, though these words were used far less commonly than monosyllables, which accounted for 8. The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones. It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,0. Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables. The most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, written with the characters of the constituent words. Words have also been created by adding affixes, reduplication and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are generally written with one character per syllable. In most cases the character denotes a morpheme descended from an Old Chinese word. How to Learn Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is quite a complex language to learn, especially for English speakers. However, with commitment and daily. Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one fifth of the 2,4. For the 5. 00 most common characters, the proportion rises to 3. Often these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word, which was often written with the same character. Learn Chinese Characters FlashcardsIn many cases the pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example, many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major source of the 4th tone in modern Standard Chinese. Scholars now believe that this tone is the reflex of an Old Chinese s suffix, with a range of semantic functions. For example, has readings OC rjon MC drjwen Mod. H zhun a record. Middle Chinese forms are given in Baxters transcription, in which H denotes the departing tone. H m grindstone. has readings juk sjuwk s to stay overnight and juks sjuw. H xi celestial mansion. H shu exhort. Another common alternation is between voiced and voiceless initials though the voicing distinction has disappeared on most modern varieties. This is believed to reflect an ancient prefix, but scholars disagree on whether the voiced or voiceless form is the original root. For example, has readings ens ken. H jin to see and ens hen. H xin to appear. has readings rats pj. H bi to defeat and rats bj. H bi to be defeated. In this case the pronunciations have converged in Standard Chinese, but not in some other varieties. Principles of formationedit. Excerpt from a 1. Chinese characters. Sun. Mountain. Elephant. Evolution of Pictograms. Chinese characters represent words of the language using several strategies.