Haiwang Yuan Professor Western Kentucky University Libraries Chinese Characters

Fact Sheet of Chinese Characters No documented history of how written Chinese originated Legendary person Cang Ji said to be creator around 4,500 years ago Created the characters on the basis of animal and fowl footprints Archeologists found 8,000-year old precursors of Chinese characters By about 3,500 years ago, Chinese characters had already formed a complete system The only ancient writing system alive in the world

How Many Chinese Characters Are There? The late Han dynasty dictionary Etymology of Chinese Characters included 9,393 characters The early Qing Kangxi Dictionary included 50,000 characters Computer encoding systems include 6,000 – 13,000 characters Only about 3,500 characters that form 80,000 words needed to read a book or newspaper

Evolution of Chinese Characters

Unified Written Chinese The Han Chinese speak 7 major dialects, such as Mandarin, Hakka, and Cantonese Almost every Chinese uses the same system thanks to the First Emperor who unified the Chinese characters There are traditional and simplified versions of Chinese characters

Pictographic characters comprise only a small portion of Chinese characters. The vast majority are pictophonetic—characters consisting of a radical and a phonetic element. Formation of Chinese Characters

Radicals of Chinese Characters A radical, known as 部首 (bù shǒu, head part) in Chinese, is a basic identifiable component of every Chinese character It’s like the root of an English word There are about 214 types of radicals, some of which are themselves characters and many of which are variants of characters The vast number of Chinese characters can be much more easily memorized if they are mentally decomposed into their constituent radicals Radicals are used in Chinese dictionaries to order characters in sets by the number of strokes they contain

214 Radicals

Strokes of Chinese Characters

Strokes - Continued

Write Chinese – Stroke Orders Every Chinese character has a correct stroke order. Learning the stroke order has two main benefits: –It will be easier to remember how to write characters if you draw them consistently –Your characters will look better

Stroke Order Rules Top to bottom: 三 Left to right: 川 Upper left corner to lower right corner 石 Outside to inside 月 When two or more strokes cross, horizontal strokes before vertical ones 十 Slanting stroke to the left before a slanting stroke to the right 人 Center stroke before symmetrical wings 小 Boxes should only be closed once the strokes inside them have been completed. So, 田 would be written: