How Chinese characters work

Chinese is written with characters, not letters. Each character is said as one syllable and usually has a meaning of its own: 人 (rén) means “person”, 大 (dà) means “big”. Most words have one or two characters. 中国 (Zhōngguó, China) is “middle” + “country”, and 电话 (diànhuà, telephone) is “electric” + “speech”.

There is no alphabet, so a character doesn't show exactly how to say it. That's what pinyin is for. Chinese people type on their phones by typing pinyin and picking the right character from a list, and you can do the same.

About 3,000 characters cover almost everything in a newspaper, and a few hundred cover most everyday text. In this course you never have to read characters: every sentence also has pinyin and English. Learning to recognise a few at a time still helps a lot, on menus, signs and phone screens.

A few characters started as pictures. 人 (rén, person) shows two legs, 山 (shān, mountain) three peaks, 日 (rì, sun) the sun, and 木 (mù, tree) a tree with its branches and roots. Some put two ideas together: 休 (xiū, to rest) is a person leaning against a tree.

Most characters are made of two parts: one hints at the meaning, the other at the sound. 妈 (mā, mother) is 女 (woman) with 马 (mǎ) as a sound hint. The question word 吗 (ma) has 口 (mouth), because it's a spoken word, and the same 马. The sound hint is often only roughly right, and the tone may be different.

The part of a character that hints at the meaning is called the radical. Dictionaries sort characters by their radical, and knowing the common ones helps you guess what a new character is about: a character with 饣 has to do with food, one with 氵 with water.

Many radicals take a narrow shape when they sit on the left of a character: 人 becomes 亻, 水 becomes 氵, 手 becomes 扌 and 心 becomes 忄.

Characters are built from a small set of strokes: horizontal 一, vertical 丨, falling to the left 丿, the dot 丶, a stroke falling to the right, and hooks and turns. 人 (rén) has two strokes, 我 (wǒ) has seven.

Every character has a fixed stroke order. Following it makes your handwriting faster and easier to read, and it helps when you write characters with a finger on a phone. The rules in the table cover most characters.

In the 1950s and 1960s, mainland China simplified many common characters so they have fewer strokes. These simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore, and this course uses them. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use the older traditional characters.

Many characters are the same in both systems, such as 人, 中, 大, 我 and 好. Where they differ, the simplified form is often a shortened version of the traditional one, so with practice you can read both. The pronunciation is the same.

These 50 characters are among the most common in Chinese, and you'll meet all of them in the first chapters. Many are words on their own; others mostly appear inside longer words. Click a character to hear it.