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The Categories of Chinese Characters

There are some reasons why foreign students find it is difficult to write Chinese characters when they learn Chinese in China. From the perspective of the relationship between Chinese characters and Chinese language, Chinese language belongs to morpheme characters. From the view of the structure of the character, it is a character system composed of meaning element and sound element and symbols indicating neither meaning nor sound.

Chinese characters originated from pictures and paintings, which is what students should know when they learn Mandarin Chinese. During the early stage of forming characters, the patterns of pictographic characters have direct connection with the meaning of the morphemes they stand for. Although every character has its fixed pronunciation, the patterns are not symbols indicating the sound.

As the evolution of the character patterns, the pictographic characters gradually changed. The patterns lost their meaning relationship with the morphemes they stand for. Students who study Chinese should know that the patterns then became the abstract symbols without functions of indicating sound and meaning. If so, we can say Chinese characters are purely symbolic characters.

We have single characters and complexes single characters in Chinese characters. But only single characters are the purely symbolic characters. Complexes single characters are made up of single characters and have a higher level than it. Students learn Mandarin should know that even though single characters are symbol, it has meaning and sound when it acts as the components of the complexes single characters.

It is essential for every student who wants to study Mandarin Chinese to know about the phonogram, which consists of phonetic indicator and meaning. Take the simplest phonogram as example, the meaning element and sound element are acted by single characters, which have meaning and sound as its component. But we just take the meaning of the meaning element.

The following are some situations and examples illustrated to help students learn Chinese. We just take the meaning of the meaning such as the component “鸟” of the character “鸠”. We just take the sound of the phonetic indicator such as the component “九” of the character “鸠”. With the evolution of the characters, some meaning element and sound element have lost the original function. For example, “球” was a kind of jade, so the meaning element is “玉”, but now “球” no longer means jade.

There is another kind of characters that express the meaning by combining the components. For examples, in ancient times, people said “止戈为武”, “人言为信”. Even though the explanations are incorrect for the characters “武” and “信”, there are many Chinese characters are made by this way like “不正为歪” and “不好为孬”. Students who study in China may be interested in this kind of characters which combine the meaning of components to express the whole meaning.

If you have attended to the one-on-one Chinese learning programs, you may know some more extended knowledge about the phonograms. Actually, there is no strict dividing line between the phonograms and non-phonograms. Even at the very beginning of making characters, the pronunciation of the phonograms was not always similar with the pronunciation of the sound elements, saying nothing of characters in nowadays.

Someone makes statistics and analysis of 7,500 combined characters for Chinese learning programs. The statistics shows that less than 5% of the combined characters have totally same sound with that of the phonetic indicators, including the initial consonant, the syllable rime and the tone. No more than 10% of them have the same initial consonant and syllable rime but different tone. About 20% of them have the same syllable rime only.

For some common sense of Chinese characters, students can learn Chinese online free for further knowledge. The components of the two kinds of characters mentioned above can either indicating meaning or sound. But the following type is different.

This kind of characters is combined by symbols, expressing neither sound nor meaning. Students learn Mandarin should know the following two conditions, one of which is that the meaning element and sound element are no longer express meaning and sound with the change of pronunciation and meaning such as “给、等、短”. Another type can be illustrated by the character “章”. We may analyze it as two parts “立” and “早”. But actually, it was a whole and had nothing to do with the “音、十、立、早”.

After knowing the relevant knowledge about the Chinese characters, students gain a clear picture about the structure of Chinese characters, which is helpful for students to master Chinese language.

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