How to learn Chinese characters?

If you are an English speaker, or any other alphabatic language speaker, Chinese is totally different from your native language.You may think each Chinese character is different from other ones, so it must be very difficult to learn Chinese characters.

Yes, there are a great number of characters, but as the matter of fact, some characters are seldom used. Only about 3000 characters are used in Chinese everyday life and cover 99.9% of characters appearing in books and newspapers. Among these 3000 characters, only about 1000 are mostly frequently used.

Chinese is an ideographic language. It means that people can guess the meaning of the character according to how it is written. Even though after the thousands years of evolution, nowadays people can still figure out the meanings from the appearance of some Chinese characters(about 5%), such as the character “山，shān, Mountains”.

The current Chinese characters used in China Mailand right now is called “Simplified Chinese characters” which have been approved since 1956, they have less strokes than the characters used in Hongkong and Taiwan. All Chinese characters are are made up 6 basic strokes, {ヽ │ ー  ╯ ╰  ˊ}.

Characters are divided into 2 groups, single-component characters and multi-component characters.

People usually start to learn Chinese characters from single-component characters since their simple structure. For example, these characters “一，yī, One”, “二, èr, Two”, “三, sān, Three”, “十, shí, Ten”, “人, rén, People”.

Most Chinese characters are multi-component characters(major 2 components), with left-right structure and top-bottom structure. The characters of these two structures count for 86% of all Chinese characters. Very often for a character, one component is called “meaning root” which indicates the meaning of the character, another component is called “sound root” which indicates the pronunciation. For example, “妈，mā, Mother, the left part 女’ means woman/female, the right part ‘马’ sounds as ‘ma’.” “烫，tàng, Hot, the top part ‘汤’ sounds as ‘tang’, the bottom part means fire.”

Some Chinese characters can be used as radicals which indicate not only the sound but also the meaning, like “人，女，力.” For example, “他，tā, He/Him, its left part 人=亻 means people/man”, “她, tā, She/Her, its left part means women”.

Many Chinese characters are associated. General speaking, learning Chinese characters is not as difficult as you may first think, why not start your journey to learn this ancient language?

To know more about the character course "Easy Way to learn Chinese characters"