Lesson 1.1: The Chinese Script

Welcome to Lesson 1.1! In this lesson, we’ll introduce ourselves to the structure of written Chinese and the many ways it’s different from the English alphabet.

The basics

The Chinese writing system (called Hanzi, from the Chinese 汉字) is composed of basic units called characters. Each character has its own one-syllable pronunciation and its own meaning. Since each character stands for a syllable rather than an individual sound, Hanzi is not classified as an alphabet.

A single character can often serve as a word on its own, but many words are composed of two or three characters put together. When that happens, the meanings of the characters merge logically to create the meaning of the word, often with hilarious results.

Chinese also uses a lot of loanwords from other languages, and for those words the characters are just chosen to sound like the foreign word.

Chinese is different from most other languages in that it uses a non-phonetic writing system. That means there is no consistent connection between a character’s written form and its pronunciation: the two just have to be memorized together. Since there are around 50,000 Chinese characters in total, with over 5,000 in common use, a lot of your practice time will be spent learning characters. Those numbers sound intimidating, but learning the characters you need is perfectly feasible if you do it gradually over a long period of time. You can practice the characters in the words you’re learning on our Characters page.

Components

At first glance, it may look like the characters are random combinations of lines, but that’s not entirely true. There are several shapes (called components) that are very common in Chinese characters, and most characters are just different combinations of those components. Components make learning characters much easier because they allow you to learn a character as a group of components instead of memorizing each individual stroke.

Also, many components have tiny meanings of their own that (often) relate to the meaning of the character. These components are called radicals.

We’ll cover the components in more detail in Lesson 1.5.

The Simplified and Traditional scripts

Hanzi is divided into two different writing systems: the Simplified script and the Traditional script. Throughout most of China’s history, the Traditional script was the only script in existence, but in 1956, the Chinese government introduced the Simplified script as an alternative that is easier to write.

The two scripts often look the same, but there are many characters that have two different written forms: a form used in Simplified Chinese and a form used in Traditional Chinese, with Traditional being more complicated. That is the only difference between the scripts: there is no difference in pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar.

Simplified Chinese is primarily used in China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Since Simplified Chinese is used in China and is easier to learn, it is the only script currently supported on Tongue of Fire.

Punctuation

Chinese and English largely use the same punctuation. Here are the two punctuation marks that are different:

• The Chinese period looks like this: 。
• The Chinese series comma (a.k.a. serial comma or enumeration comma) looks like this: 、 and is used instead of the standard comma when listing objects or actions. The standard comma (，) is still used in other cases.

An even more important difference between English and Chinese is that Chinese uses no spaces. Characters come one after another with no spaces between words. However, since each word is only one to three characters long (much shorter than an English word), it isn’t too hard to tell where the word breaks are if you know all the words.

It may look like the punctuation marks are followed by spaces, but they actually aren’t. Digital Chinese punctuation marks have some built-in buffer space so that, when they’re shown in a sentence, it looks like they’re separated from the following characters. If you slowly highlight the example sentence above on your computer, though, you’ll see that there are no spaces. You’ll never have to type a space when typing standard Chinese text, even after a punctuation mark.

And that’s the Chinese writing system! Hanzi is very different from the English writing system, but as you interact with Chinese more and more, we assure you it will start to come naturally. Since the entire language is built out of characters, we strongly recommend using our Characters page to learn the characters in your words before learning the words themselves. That way, you’ll be able to learn smaller chunks of information at one time, and you’ll get to know the meaning of each character, which will make it easier to learn any word containing that character in the future. You can see how to use that page by navigating to it and clicking the Show Tour button at the top of the screen.

Just for the sake of exposure, here’s an example passage in Chinese: try to identify the pieces you’ve learned in this lesson!

一天放学后，我看到一个又大又棕色的东西从天上掉下来。我去查看，发现我所有的老师都可疑地躲在学校旁边的森林里！我问他们：“打扰一下，你们在这里做什么？” “你今年多大？” 科学老师说道。当我告诉他我十八岁的时候，他说：“你肯定年纪太大了，不会再天真了，所以你肯定已经知道真相了。我其实是圣诞老人。我、我妹妹和其他老师正在帮助雨鹿训练飞行。再过三个月，它们就能在圣诞节前夜飞翔了。不过，别告诉任何人！”