How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

Con­trary to some­what pop­u­lar belief, Chi­nese char­ac­ters aren’t just lit­tle pic­tures. In fact, most of them aren’t pic­tures at all. The very old­est, whose evo­lu­tion can be traced back to the “ora­cle bone” script of thir­teenth cen­tu­ry BC etched direct­ly onto the remains of tur­tles and oxen, do bear traces of their pic­to­graph ances­tors. But most Chi­nese char­ac­ters, or hanzi, are logo­graph­ic, which means that each one rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent mor­pheme, or dis­tinct unit of lan­guage: a word, or a sin­gle part of a word that has no inde­pen­dent mean­ing. Nobody knows for sure how many hanzi exist, but near­ly 100,000 have been doc­u­ment­ed so far.

Not that you need to learn all of them to attain lit­er­a­cy: for that, a mere 3,000 to 5,000 will do. While it’s tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to mem­o­rize that many char­ac­ters by rote, you’d do bet­ter to begin by famil­iar­iz­ing your­self with their basic nature and struc­ture — and in so doing, you’ll nat­u­ral­ly learn more than a lit­tle about their long his­to­ry.

The TED-Ed les­son at the top of the post pro­vides a brief but illu­mi­nat­ing overview of “how Chi­nese char­ac­ters work,” using ani­ma­tion to show how ancient sym­bols for con­crete things like a per­son, a tree, the sun, and water became ver­sa­tile enough to be com­bined into rep­re­sen­ta­tions of every­thing else — includ­ing abstract con­cepts.

In the Man­darin Blue­print video just above, host Luke Neale goes deep­er into the struc­ture of the hanzi in use today. Whether they be sim­pli­fied ver­sions of main­land Chi­na or the tra­di­tion­al ones of Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and else­where, they’re for the most part con­struct­ed not out of whole cloth, he stress­es, but from a set of exist­ing com­po­nents. That may make a prospec­tive learn­er feel slight­ly less daunt­ed, as may the fact that rough­ly 80 per­cent of Chi­nese char­ac­ters are “seman­tic-pho­net­ic com­pounds”: one com­po­nent of the char­ac­ter pro­vides a clue to its mean­ing, and anoth­er a clue to its pro­nun­ci­a­tion. (Not that it nec­es­sar­i­ly makes deci­pher­ing them an effort­less task.)

In the dis­tant past, hanzi were also the only means of record­ing oth­er Asian lan­guages, like Viet­namese and Kore­an. Still today, they remain cen­tral to the Japan­ese writ­ing sys­tem, but like any oth­er cul­tur­al form trans­plant­ed to Japan, they’ve hard­ly gone unal­tered there: the NativLang video just above explains the trans­for­ma­tion they’ve under­gone over mil­len­nia of inter­ac­tion with the Japan­ese lan­guage. It was­n’t so very long ago that, even in their home­land, hanzi were threat­ened with the prospect of being scrapped in the dubi­ous name of mod­ern effi­cien­cy. Now, with those afore­men­tioned almost-100,000 char­ac­ters incor­po­rat­ed into Uni­code, mak­ing them usable through­out our 21st-cen­tu­ry dig­i­tal uni­verse, it seems they’ll stick around — even longer, per­haps, than the Latin alpha­bet you’re read­ing right now.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

What Ancient Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know It: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Dis­cov­er Nüshu, a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Chi­nese Writ­ing Sys­tem That Only Women Knew How to Write

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.