Chapter 1

Wrapping Your Mind around the Chinese Writing System

IN THIS CHAPTER

Grasping the complexity of written Chinese

Understanding the difference between traditional and simplified characters

Getting excited and developing some strategies to help you learn to write in Chinese

The Chinese writing system is many things, but easy isn't one of them. It's unique, it's beautiful, and it's remarkable in its complexity. But just how does anyone attack a written language that doesn't even have an alphabet? And how do you know which way to write it or read it, if the characters can go from left to right, right to left, or up and down?

In this chapter, I give the lowdown on these age-old questions and more. I also give you tips on how to write and how to memorize at least the first 100 characters out of a language that has thousands of them.

Appreciating the Complexities of Written Chinese

Chinese has the distinction of being the mother tongue of the oldest continuous civilization on earth as well as the language spoken by the greatest number of people. It is also has arguably one of the most intricate written languages in the world, with about 50,000 characters in a typical Chinese dictionary - 28,000 of which are already obsolete.

So why keep obsolete words in a Chinese dictionary, you ask? Same reason we keep them in English dictionaries. They may no longer be used regularly, if at all, but they do still exist. Haven't you ever felt crapulous? What? You've never been stuffed to the gills? Back in the 16th century, that Late Latin word meant just that. While we don't use that word anymore, it can still be found in any dictionary worth its salt. Those are the kinds of words you'll find in Chinese dictionaries too. This character, lì ? (pronounced "lee") variously meant chestnut, trembling, or afraid. That character with those original meanings is now obsolete, but one more stroke was added to the basic character, and the resulting character ? took over with a new meaning: ancestral tablet - a stone slab or piece of wood used by Chinese people to revere their ancestors.

To read a Chinese newspaper with relative ease, you only need to know about 3,000 to 4,000 characters. A well-educated person will be able to read between 4,000 and 6,000 characters and 40,000 to 60,000 words, each of which is comprised of one, two, or three characters. Armed with only 500 characters, you can recognize 75 percent of all Chinese words. And if you know 1,000 characters, you'll be able to read almost 90 percent of a newspaper.

Traditionally, only the wealthiest could afford the time and money to have their sons tutored in a written language so complex that it necessitated years of study to master. China has been a subsistence level society for centuries, and hunger and famine were real things not to be taken for granted. As a result, few people were literate in ancient China.

While Chinese characters are beautiful and filled with meaning in just one glance, with the sheer number of characters needed for even a rudimentary level of literacy, many could only see its impracticality and predicted its replacement by the more efficient alphabet. Thus began the creation of Pinyin (a form of transliteration which used Latin letters to reflect the pronunciation of Chinese words, such as our own in English), and the march toward language reform.

How the Written Word Unifies China

For thousands of years, spoken Chinese has been subdivided into hundreds of regional dialects, most of them mutually incomprehensible. Throughout the centuries, dynasty after dynasty, kingdom after kingdom, the one thing that united the Chinese people was the written word.

Even today, if two Chinese people are sitting next to each other on a train and one is from Beijing and speaks Mandarin, while the other is from the south and speaks Cantonese, and they read a newspaper out loud to each other they would have absolutely no idea what the other one is saying. However, if they look at the same characters and read silently next to each other, they will both understand the same thing. It is easier for them to write to each other than carry on an actual conversation.

In fact, spoken Chinese, with its many tones, leaves the door open for ever greater possibilities of meanings with any given word, including words that are not only pronounced the same but also spoken with the same tone. It is only by looking at the written word that the intended meaning and word become clear, if context alone is not enough.

Chinese people don't only speak one of the two dialects we typically associate with the spoken language: Mandarin and Cantonese. Hundreds of spoken dialects exist, representing every province, city, or town throughout the country, but Mandarin is the official dialect taught in all schools.

This unification of the country through the written word came about during the Qin (pronounced "chin") dynasty. It was during this dynasty that the tyrannical emperor Shi Huangdi had the famous terra cotta warriors made to accompany and protect him in the afterlife. He standardized many things during his short reign to further solidify his rule, foremost among them being the Chinese writing system. If he announced a new edict, everyone could read it.

What? No Alphabet?

Most of the world's languages are written alphabetically, with each letter representing only a sound, rather than containing any meaning. Chinese writing is logographic, however, so each character represents an entire a word or part of a compound word, necessitating thousands of characters. The word diànnao ?? (dyan now), for example, is composed of diàn, meaning electric, and nao, meaning brain. Put them together, and you have electronic brain, otherwise known as a computer. While this is fascinating and brilliant, the unabashed truth is that since there's no alphabet in Chinese, the only way to learn characters is the good old-fashioned way: study, study, study. Roll up your sleeves, put in the time, and memorize each and every one of them.

While learning Chinese characters sometimes feels like an insurmountable task, if you follow this book step-by-step and get to know the radicals and other components that comprise the characters, your study of Chinese will become much, much easier in no time.

Which Way Did They Go? The Direction of Characters

Since each character in Chinese is in and of itself a word, or a part of a compound word (two characters that make a separate word when combined together), they can be written and read in almost any order - right to left, left to right, or top to bottom. Every which way except diagonal.

If you go to a Chinese movie, you may see several subtitles: one in English, going from left to right, one in Chinese, also going left to right, and suddenly another Chinese line going from right to left. You may go cross-eyed for a while trying to follow them both, but you'll get the hang of it soon enough. And if you really want a shock, you just might also see a further set of subtitles written vertically, projected onto a wall, so your eyes begin to feel like ping-pong balls. Then all bets are off.

Right to left and left to right are common enough, but why top to bottom, you may ask? Before the invention of paper (by the Chinese, I might add), around the 8th century BCE, Chinese was originally written on pieces of bamboo, which necessitated writing vertically in the same direction as the strips of bamboo.

You can also see the role of bamboo strips in the character for the word volume (as in the volume of a book): ? (?) cè (tsuh). The simplified character consists of two bamboo strips connected by a piece of string, while the traditional character (in parentheses) looks like even more bamboo strips tied together by a string.

See whether you can tell what the following Taoist saying means, no matter which direction it's going. To help give you a head start, in parentheses I've written the definition of each individual character. From there you can string them together and take a stab at translating the whole saying. Here are the meanings of the four characters in the saying:

• ? zhi (jir) (to know)
• ? zhe (juh) (possessive article, as in "the one who")
• ? bù (boo) (negative prefix, such as no, not, or doesn't)
• ? yán (yeah-n) (classical Chinese word for to speak)

Okay, here's the saying in three different directions. See whether you can figure it out by the time it's written top to bottom.

Left to right:

????, ????

zhi zhe bù yán

Right to left:

????,...