learn to Write Chinese Characters

The written Mandarin language is one of the oldest present languages, dating from the old Shang Dynasty, more than three thousand years ago, and is utilized by almost 1.3 billion people in the world. Chinese characters in the writing form can be very intricate, beautiful, and ornate; therefore it’s really surprising that writing the mandarin character is considered an art form, known as Mandarin Calligraphy.

This article is aimed at total newbies who’ve slight to no knowledge of the mandarin language.

We aim to provide you the proper knowledge you have to make a fine start with learning to write the Chinese language and to learn with your mind.

Let’s have look at some key concepts to learn in learning to write Chinese properly:

But first, let me explain about Chinese characters….

About Chinese characters…

There is a very big amount of academic research in the part, but we do not need to concern ourselves with that here. All I wish to explain here is one of the most basic concepts of Chinese character so that you easier equipped to learn to write mandarin.

So let’s start!

First up! Mandarin characters are not an alphabet. 

That’s Chinese characters are not in letters forms and don’t spell words. Instead, every character is a single syllable, has a proper set of meaning, and fits into a square room.

Let me explain!

Have a look at these 4 Chinese characters as well as their pronunciations. Do not worry about the word pronunciations at the time – we are only interested in learning to write Mandarin here!

• 杯 (bēi) cup
• 跑 (pǎo) run
• 树 (shù) tree
• 快 (kuài) fast

As you can see, every Chinese character has a 1 syllable pronunciation, and a meaning. One meaning has been given for any of the 4 mandarin characters above, but character often has many meanings. Sometimes they can have various pronunciations as well!

In the early phases, though, you do not need to worry about that. You will be learning 1 method and 1 pronunciation of each character.

It is very easy to understand, am right?

You might have noticed that the meaning given for every Chinese character above looks to be a word. This is often the matter; one character can often be words on their own. Though, character and words are not similar things in Mandarin. Words are often made up of 2 or more characters.

Let me give you another instance.

Again, we look to have two 2 perfectly meaningful words there. Though, these 2 characters can unite to form a word:

• 中国 (Zhōngguó) China

By joining the characters for middle as well as country, we get the word for Chine. 

This is why everyone sometimes claims that China is named the middle kingdom in Mandarin. It is surely true that the word for china is made up of the words for middle and country.

The other vital thing to learn is that whilst individuals characters can often be the words, many character words are the standard.

What do we mean by that?

Well, you saw I mentioned above that the character 国 (guó) means country on its own. Though, to say country in a sentence you would utilize a 2 character word.

• 国家 (guójiā) country

I have put another character, 家 (jiā), after the one of the country, to make a word that means country. This might look pointless, but it is how the language works!

One key reason most words contain 2 or more characters is that it makes things clearer. Modern Mandarin has an extremely limited set of syllables (About 350 to 400 without tones), so the spoken language would get extremely confusing if every word was just 1 syllable.

The tones in Mandarin are a single way to make words more distinct, and having many characters each word is another.

In the past, Mandarin was much more monosyllabic (one syllable each word), and there was a very closer connection of one word to each character.

In modern mandarin, though, most of the words are 2 characters. They can be any figure of characters, in fact, but 2 are most common here.

As you can see learn mandarin words, you will find that this has a very cool side effect, when you learn a new word or character, you can often combine it with others you know to get many different words.

Chinese character Key components

I hope you have now got some authentic idea of what the term Mandarin character means. If you would like to know more about this, there is a limitless amount of material about the topic. For this article to learn to write Chinese, however, I think the overhead goes into enough detail.

The next vital thing you have to know is that individual Chinese characters can be brown down. Yes, you read it write. Every character is made up of some components. Have a look at the following character:

• 河 (hé) river

This Chinese character means River. You can actually break it down into 2 parts.

Here is the example!

• 氵 (shuǐ) water
• 可 (kě) able

The primary one looks to make sense, it means water that is clearly related to the river.

But, what is the 2nd part of doing?

The meaning able does not look to have anything to do with River. But seem at the pronunciation of the 2nd part:kě. It sounds quite the same as the pronunciation to do with water and it sounds similar to kě". It a very much like Chinese character work this way: one part provides you a hint about how to pronounce rightly, and one part provides you a hint about what it actually means.

These key components can combine into characters in all sorts of methods: side by side, on top of that, inside, outside, underneath, etc. 

As you learn more Chinese characters, you will learn to spot the different key components that they contain. It is extremely vital that you pay attention to these various components and what they actually mean.

Focusing on the key components and considering how they form characters rightly makes it much simpler to keep in mind how to write Mandarin characters properly.

So, how many Chinese characters?

One question that often comes up when people start learning to write and read Mandarin is how many characters are there?

There’re all sorts of different numbers given for this, a few of which are quite scary, but you do not need to worry about it. A few people might say you, just need three thousand characters or some other number, given for this, a few of that are quite scary, but you do not need to worry about it.

One huge problem with talking about how many Chinese characters are essential to write and read is that characters are not a similar thing as words, as I explained before. 

You much know the structure as well as pronunciation and grammar and every sort of other things to be capable to write and read Chinese. There is no point fixating on any specific amount of characters. People do not tend to ask, how many French characters are there?

When they start learning French, and it is equally pointless to ask similar things about Mandarin characters.

If any of the figures look intimidating just ignore them. Your level of learning will dramatically boost as you go on, particularly in the early times.

At any time, the single thing you can do is just moving forwards. In the 1st year, you will make absolutely staggering growth if you put a light of time every day. I’d strongly recommend that you highly focus on making progress and not on achieving some ultimate goal figure.

Some important distinctions 

It is probably a fine idea to make some additional things clear.

Traditional and Simplified

There’s 2 board of sets of mandarin characters in use to write. These are called traditional and simplified Chinese characters. These are just different methods of writing similar words. They’re surely not a separate language or something like that. Unfortunately, the relationship between the traditional and simplified characters sets is not completely straightforward. There is not an easy one to once discussion.

This situation comes about hardly as follows (I am cutting out every sort of detail here to make this process simpler to understand). In the past, there were just traditional mandarin characters. Then the Chinese GOVT decided to make a few of those simpler but not at all, by decreasing the number of strokes and swapping key components for less complicated ones.

In few cases, 2 or more traditional characters got decreased into 1 simplified one. So we have got a new bundle of characters, simplified Mandarin that has many overlaps with some old sets. The tricky way is that some simplified words map to many different traditional ones.

I do not think it is worth going into further detail that my guide aimed at helping newbies start to learn to write. The single thing you have to be concerned with at this part is whether you wish to learn traditional characters or simplified characters. Some learn both, which is another good option.

Here is my consideration to making the choice:

• You are only interested in Taiwan or Hong Kong: Learn traditional characters
• You are only interested in Singapore or China: learn simplified characters
• You in only interested in classical mandarin: learn traditional characters
• You are a bit of a language nerd and you are interested in all: leaning both simplified and traditional

I would not worry very much about making the incorrect choice at the part. It’s completely possible to learn the other set any phase regardless of which one you started with. In my opinion.

I’d also say that despite the name, simplified is not any simple to learn. Some learner would disagree, but having fewer strokes in character barely makes some difference to remember it, if you ask me about this. 

Color is not any simpler to keep in mind than Colour in English. Sometimes the additional detail and basic logic in traditional characters make them simple to learn than simplified.

Writing vs Reading

You’d consider the big difference between being able to read and being able to write. It is completely possible to learn to read without being able to write it at all that is less true of EU languages. There’re indeed several non-Chinese who can read mandarin rightly but cannot write well. This is not necessarily a bad thing for me.

If you do want to learn to write mandarin, that is good. Just ensure you consider, how valuable it’s is, when learning to just read is dramatically simple and less time commuting.

Speaking vs written 

Another deliberation to make is whether you wish to deal with the written language at all, most learners do, but it’s a choice. You’ll progress with your spoken mandarin very faster if you ignore the written. I think it would be a true shape to miss out on the wonders of written mandarin, but I do think it is a completely valid point to just learn to listen and speak if that is the main priority.

As you read above, written mandarin is somewhat phonetic some of the time, but credibly you generally do not know how to write a character just from knowing how to say it rightly. Once again, unlike EU languages, this makes a big chasm between being able to speak mandarin and being able to write and read it.

The final thing I wish to point out in this key concept to learn to write Chinese is that as a non-native Chinese speaker, you’d learn to write in a completely different method to native speakers. Natives tend to learn to write in a very traditional method based on rote repetition. This is a very horrible technique, but it works only for natives for the following reasons:

• They have got 10 years of school period to do it in
• They are in class surrounded by others doing a similar thing and teachers telling them to do, so 6hey are quite well motivated to do it.
• They’re surrounded by mandarin characters daily
• They’ve a very deep understanding of the spoken language that they can link to learning to write Chinese.

You probably do not have all 4 of these points on your side, and even if you do it, there is a way better method to learn to write. The rote-learning way does not actually work all that well even for natives. Several people today struggle to remember how to write characters once they are out of school, because they type way more than they write, and you just need to know the pronunciation of Chinese characters to type it.

Take away…

If you’re interested to learn Chinese, you’ve to find a proper source and tools to start the process from cchatty tools if you are keen to learn to write, read or speak the Chinese language. To memorize Chinese characters and Vocabulary Chinese copybook generator and, Chinese flashcard are ideal tools for you, they’re completely printable and very handy to learn Chinese.