The changes in words meanings and forms lead to the results that the meaning elements do not indicate meanings and sound elements do not indicate pronunciation. Then, some foreign students who attend toone-on-one Chinese learning programs may wonder how many Chinese words have the meaning elements that do not indicate meanings. Some scholars ever regarded the 7000 characters in General Characters List of Modern Chinese as the object of research to make analysis and statistics about the meaning elements in Chinese characters.
From all 7000 general characters, they find 5631 characters belong to phonetic structure, accounting for 80.5% of the total number. The phonetic structure characters here mean the characters have the obvious meaning element and sound element in structure, including the phonetic structure characters have meaning elements and sound elements but do not indicate the meaning and pronunciation. All of the 5631 characters include 246 meaning elements.
The scholars divide the degree of meaning elements indicating meanings into three levels, the first of which is the completely meaning indicating that the meaning element and the meaning are totally the same like “父”, the meaning element of “爸”. The second degree that the foreign students who study Mandarin online should know is the basically meaning indicating that the meaning elements and meanings are just partially the same or related. The last condition is the meaning elements have nothing to do with the meanings.
According to analysis and statistics, there are 47 characters have meaning elements that totally indicate the meanings, accounting for 0.83%. There are 4838 characters with the meaning elements that partially indicate the meanings, taking the proportion of 85.92%, which is the most. And the rest are the characters with meaning elements that do not indicate meanings at all. We can see that 4838 characters with elements partially indicating the meanings. If the associative characters and self-explanatory characters such as 刃、本、末、休、泪、林and伐are added, the number will be increased much more.
According to the results, the foreign students who come to learn Chinese in China can see that the number of Chinese characters that the meaning elements indicating the meanings is relatively big. As a result, the Chinese language learners can study Chinese characters with the help of this rule in guessing the meanings of the phonetic characters.