This is not true of Chinese, while some characters do look a bit like other characters, for example 鸣 (ming) looks a lot like the above character for bird, but with that extra square, and means the sound which animals (not just birds) make, sometimes translated as squawks. In English we can simply add the letter s to the word apple, for example, to make a plural, referring to more than one apple. So it’s tempting to think of strokes as being analogous to letters in English, but they are absolutely not. ![]() ![]() The character for one is composed of one single stroke, and the character for bird is composed of five strokes. A more technical definitionįor a more precise idea we can take the very technical definition given in “ The Chinese Lexicon: A Comprehensive Survey” by Yip Po-Ching, which states that: “ in Chinese is a graphic form composed of a number of strokes and confided to a square shaped area.” (). In this article I’m going to talk about the Chinese characters used to display modern standard Mandarin. In some languages, the word “symbol” or “sign” is taken to mean “character”, but in English, the correct word should always be “character”, not “letter”, “sign”, “symbol” or any other equivalent. They can be found in Vietnam, Korea, Japanese and other parts of the world. ![]() Chinese characters have a very long history and have evolved and spread forming the basis for many writing systems in Asia (just like how many European languages use words derived from Latin or Ancient Greek). A Chinese character (or a “汉字”, “Hanzi” in Chinese) is a written character used to represent meaning. How do we count Chinese characters? Simple Definition of Chinese charactersīefore we learn to count Chinese characters, let’s start by defining them.
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