Hello and welcome back!
This is ChineseFor.Us Hands-on Writing—StrokeByStroke!
I’m Lili.
And I’m Chuck!
Today we’ll talk about a few more questions.
Should I learn Chinese characters?
How many do I have to learn?
And how many characters are there?
hǎo.
OK, First question, Should I learn Chinese characters?
Definitely, because it’s a key part of learning Chinese.
Why you might ask?
Because, the Chinese phonetic syllables are really simple.
There are only about 400 of them.
And these 400 cover thousands of characters, with each character usually having more than
one meaning.
So chances are, different characters and words sound exactly the same but mean totally different
things.
Like one single syllable, could be shared by more than 10 characters, each of which
carrying multiple meanings.
So using Pinyin as the writing system is not very efficient at conveying the same kind
of information as characters.
Like qīng could mean “light” “clear” “green” “tilted” and “hydrogen”.
So it’s not like in English, when these phonetic elements could indicate meanings,
Pinyin only provides pronunciation.
duì.
So we still have to learn at least SOME characters.
That’s why we will be asking the second question.
How many characters should I learn?
Well, there are over 5000 of characters.
However, most Chinese people don’t even know that much.
Let’s take a look at this pie chart.
Suppose that this is all the written materials in the Chinese world.
Personal mail, newspaper, books, online articles…
you name it.
Suppose this chart covers all of the characters found in these materials.
Then the most frequently used 5 characters: de的yī一shì是le了wǒ我 covers 10% of
them.
Really!?
And If we add 12 more it would cover 20%.
Again, if we add 25 and make it 42, they cover 30% of all written materials.
And if we keep on going, and add 37 to make it 79, these 79 would cover 40%.
And the most commonly used 380, would cover up to 70% of all written materials.
And if we bring the number up to 1000 characters, it will cover over 90%.
And finally 2400 characters would cover 99%.
For elementary students in China, if they know 2400 characters, they should be able
to read general publications no problem.
But we need to be careful because each character could have more than one meaning.
For example, wǒ“我” has 4 meanings; de的 has more than 5 meanings, and in some
rare cases, such as dǎ打, the character has more than 25 meanings.
Don’t be intimidated though, because these meanings are usually related to each other.
Right!
So when a character is combined with another character, each giving out one specific meaning,
the combination becomes a new “word”.
For example, when the personal pronoun wǒ我 meets possessive particle de的, we have our
new word, wǒde我的, which means my or mine.
When zì自 self, meets with wǒ我, you get zìwǒ “自我” which means ego or one’s
self.
One of the most distinguishable characteristics of the Chinese language, is that a lot of
the times, when two or more characters are put-together to make a new word, usually the
new word’s meaning is related to the meaning of the two characters.
Just like when we combine wǒ我 with guó国, which means country.
wǒguó我国means one’s own country.
So, the meaning of Chinese words is generally easy to remember if you know the meaning of
the characters.
Imagine how many combinations of characters we could build with just the basic 380 or
1000 characters?
And as we showed you earlier, once we know all the words that are made from the basic
1000 characters, we should be able to read and understand over 90% of all written materials!
And you don’t necessarily have to be able to write each character by heart either, as
long as you can recognize them, you should be able to read and type easy.
And this video series will serve as a guide for understanding the structure of Chinese
characters, you’ll be surprised at how well you’ll understand the logic, and patterns
behind the characters.
They won’t just look random or don’t make sense to you anymore.
For each video, we’ve prepared a printable tracing sheet that you can download and practice
along with the videos.
It’s a GREAT way to remember the shape of the characters.
And you could decide whether you want to be able to write these characters by heart, or
just to be able to recognize them.
In any case, this video series is designed to help you along the way.
So, I hope this video answers some of your questions.
Next course we’ll talk about another topic that Chinese learners debate about: which
is, writing vs. typing.
Stay tuned and see you next time!
xièxie谢谢，zàijiàn再见！