Understanding how Chinese characters work

Whether you are a complete beginner of Chinese, an intermediate or advanced student,

a teacher, interpreter, translator or researcher, at some point in your life you would have
probably asked yourself this question: Why are Chinese characters like this?

有獻不死之藥於荊王者。謁者操之以入。中射之士問
曰。可食乎。曰。可。因奪而食之。王大怒。使人殺中
射之士。中射之士使人說王曰。臣問謁者。曰。可食。
臣故食之。是臣無罪而罪在謁者也。且客獻不死之藥。
臣食之而王殺臣。是死藥也。是客欺王也。夫殺無罪之
臣而明人之欺王也。不如釋臣。王乃不殺。

Why are they so complicated? Why are they so complex? Why are they so diverse and
yet look so similar? Why can’t I recognize anything? Why is it so hard to see any patterns,
except, perhaps, repeating commas and periods?

Here is a text written with Roman letters:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed

do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation
ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse
cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

This is a dummy text and I don’t know what it means, but it looks familiar and I can make
some sense out of it. I can recognize all the letters in it. I know that the first five letters of
the first line form a word because they are separated by a space from the next set of five
letters which is also a word. I don’t know what the text means, but since I know how to
pronounce Roman letters, if this were a real language and I were to read the text aloud,
someone speaking this language might even understand what I’m saying. None of that
seems possible with Chinese. So how do we make sense of seemingly indecipherable
Chinese texts?

This book hopes to answer all these questions.

13
A good way to start understanding the Chinese writing system is by engaging with a very
common misconception: that Chinese characters are pictures. Most of them are not.
Chinese characters did start out as pictures thousands of years ago, but a long time has
passed since then and today the overwhelming majority—more than 95%—of them are
not pictures, as will be explained shortly.

Using pictures to record meaning

Imagine we are about to develop a writing system and for some reason we decide to use
pictures to do so. When, for instance, we want to write the word apple, bear, eye or face
we can do this:

Everyday objects like food, animals or body parts are quite easy to write using pictures,
because they are visual in nature. In essence, anything that is visual, even dynamic
actions (e.g.: to run), emotions (e.g.: happy or angry) or certain physiological states (e.g.:
hungry) can be written using pictures:

The eight simple examples above represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which are the
basic building blocks of language. If we were to make a writing system, these building
blocks would allow us to start creating simple collocations:

The following logically means hungry bear:

If we switch around the picture order:

we get Bear (is) hungry

14
.. or we can expand the sentence by adding another picture from our collection:

Bear (is) hungry (and) angry.

We now can write using pictures, or at least to a certain extent. Pictures cannot be
assigned to everything we normally want to write about; some concepts are too abstract,
others too specific and the sheer number of pictures necessary in order for this writing
system to be fully functional would be too great to remember. However, we have created
a writing system that in many cases does work, depending on what we need.

When it comes to actual Chinese characters, a small percentage can still be traced back
to simple pictures similar to the examples shown above, the majority, however, works in
a different way.

Improving our writing system

One thing we can do to improve the writing system is, instead of creating a unique picture
every time we need one, to use an existing picture and then add an arrow or something
else to indicate the new meaning like this:

This would be the iris.

Another thing we can do is to start combining existing pictures into new ones:

This would be to read.

15
These two methods do not only keep the number of pictures growing at a more acceptable
rate, they also give us more flexibility by allowing us to assign pictures to words that are
either less visual, more specific or simply too difficult to draw. Chinese characters use
these same two methods—adding an indicator to an existing character or combining two
or more existing characters to come up with a new one.

Using pictures for sound

We can further improve our system by doing the following: If we want to write I (am)
hungry we can do this:

We can choose an existing picture (like ) to represent a word that has no picture
assigned to it yet (like I, me) simply because the two words happen to sound similar. This
is especially helpful when we need pictures to represent words like pronouns or parts of
grammar that are difficult to draw.

In order to write I (am) not hungry, we can do this:

In order to write I not see hungry bear, we can do this:

Some Chinese characters follow precisely this scheme: an existing character is chosen
to represent a word that has no character assigned to it, simply because the two words
happen to sound similar. These characters are called ‘sound loans’ because they are
‘loaned’ based on their sound to words that have no characters assigned to them.

Pictures incorporating sound and meaning

With the introduction of sound loans with pictures like or we are only one step
away from another improvement:

16
We can specify the meaning of the picture we are using like this:

If has a little next to it, it means I, myself. If has a little X (a symbol for
‘no’) next to it means no.

The reason why this is an important invention is that these new combined pictures consist
of two fully equivalent parts or slots: one holding the meaning and one for the sound.
We added indicators to pictures to indicate their meanings, combined the meaning of
multiple pictures, created sound loans, but we never used the meaning of one picture
and the sound of another:

Taking as a model, we can now basically take any two existing pictures and combine
them into new ones with one picture representing the meaning and the other one the
sound of the picture combination as a whole. Using this method, we could even go so
far as to combine one with another to specify that the combined picture
represents the actual knot and not the English negative ‘not’:

This system is very efficient because:

• it is able to represent any abstract meaning

• it can be very specific and avoid ambiguity

and

• it keeps the number of pictures manageable by ‘recycling’ them and combining them
into new ones.

The vast majority of Chinese characters employ exactly this type of sound–meaning

17
combination. Throughout history, these character types were systematically
introduced into the writing system, often replacing earlier character types, to the point
where probably more than 90% of all frequently used characters today are of this kind.

Types of Chinese characters in use today

To summarize, the following is a list of Chinese character types that you will encounter in
almost any text written in Chinese today:

The type where the picture stands for what it means1:

The type where an arrow or something else indicates the meaning of the picture2:

A combination of the meaning of two or more pictures3:

A picture representing another meaning based on its sound4:

1 Referred to in this book as pictograms.

2 Referred to in this book as simple indicative characters (also called simple ideograms).
3 Referred to in this book as semantic compounds (also called compound ideograms or logical
aggregates).
4 Referred to in this book as sound loans (also called phonetic loans, rebuses or borrowings).

18
A picture used for its sound with a specifier indicating its meaning5:

The various types above represent the traditional classification of Chinese characters that
you will find in most academic papers and textbooks. For practical reasons however, we
prefer to classify characters in this book in the following way:

Without a sound component With a sound component

As you can see, compared to the traditional classification, there are only four character
types instead of five. The character type (phonetic loans) is missing. We do not
classify phonetic loans separately, because they can structurally be any of the above four
character types, and we feel that classifying them separately would be impractical and
confusing. This will hopefully be made clearer as we progress through the book.

As a learning aid, in the table above we further divide these four character types into two
major categories: those with a sound component and those without. First, as mentioned
before, characters with a sound component make up approximately more than 90% of
all frequently used Chinese characters today. Secondly, we feel that characters without a
sound component are, in one form or another, only images conveying visual information.
The presence of a sound component transforms the character into much more than just
an image and it only makes sense to separate this character type from the rest, but we
felt it important to aid the reader by clearly addressing this fact through the table above.

To complete the explanation, according to the traditional classification of Chinese

characters, there is also a sixth, very rare and not well-understood, group of characters
called the Derived Characters or Transformed Cognates. Without going into too much
detail, after extensive research and discussions with experts in the field, we believe that
these characters are a subset of character types (phono–semantic compounds)

5 Referred to in this book as phono–semantic compounds.

19
being formed in a slightly different way (see 觉 p.269, 度 p.270 and 望 p.271).
Therefore, they are not listed in this book as a separate character group.

Reminder: Chinese characters are not pictures

It is worth mentioning again that due to the systematic introduction of character

types (phono–semantic compounds) into the writing system, probably more than 90%
of frequently used Chinese characters in use today are of this kind. They constitute an
advanced system of writing and while based on pictures it can definitely not be said
that character types are pictures.

Of the remaining 10% of characters in frequent use today, most of them are characters
like or which are formed by two or more pictures or indicators, in which
pictures are used more for the information they hold and less like actual visual images.
Only a very small number of frequently-used characters today is based on simple pictures
like and even those have been simplified and formatted so much that, save a few
examples, it is practically impossible to recognize what a given type character visually
represents without further explanation. The premise that Chinese characters are pictures
in the traditional sense of the word is thus almost always wrong.

Visual evolution

We are left with one more problem. Chinese characters, even the few that are pictures,
don’t look anything like this:

The two main reasons are that pictures in general are a) too complex and b) too irregular
to be used in everyday writing. The picture for hungry for instance would take at least a
minute to draw, and due to its complexity, 100 different people would probably come up
with 100 different pictures of this hungry man. This means that you might not recognize
what other people write, which is of course a big problem. On a very basic level, the main
function of writing is to record thoughts and make them accurately available at any point
in the future for the person who recorded them or for anyone else. If 100 people wanting
to write hungry write 100 different and disparate versions of , this functionality is
greatly compromised.

It is thus necessary to simplify the pictures and make the writing more uniform. In the
following step we’ll do it analogously to the way Chinese characters were streamlined:

20
 吴
By doing so, we get closer to what we need. It is safe to start using the word ‘character’
instead of ‘picture’ at this point. We removed a lot of unnecessary strokes, preserved
the shape of individual pictures and started using the same or similar stroke types in
all of them. They are still however too complex and too irregular. After another round of
simplifying and making the characters more uniform we finally arrive to what Chinese
characters look like today:

They are as minimal as can be and even though the standardization of strokes might
not be as obvious, the above characters are all written using only six basic stroke types.

Notice that the above sentence is still the original English sentence I not see hungry bear.
This is not an actual Chinese translation, and the five characters shown above do not
actually mean eye, knot (not), sea (see), hungry and bear in Chinese either. It is a rough
sentence in English, using some Chinese characters and characters like and that
do not even exist in Chinese, which I created solely for the purpose of illustrating this
example sentence.

We now have a bit of an answer to the questions we initially posed. Chinese characters,
while seemingly complicated to those of us who are used to alphabetic writing systems,
have their own logic. They either mean the thing they visually represent, or sound like the
thing that they represent, mean something that is a combination of the meaning of two or
more characters, have an indicator indicating their meaning or— for the vast majority of
characters—have a meaning component and a sound component. We correctly think of
alphabetic writing systems as phonetic but as said earlier the overwhelming majority of
Chinese characters have a phonetic aspect as well. To the extent that these characters
are or come from pictures, those pictures are now so highly stylized that they are not
easily recognizable as the visual representations they started as.

And despite appearances, they are not formed by an endless number of complicated
strokes—only 6 basic types. These make up every character, or combine into standardized
character components which then in turn make up characters again, as will be shown
throughout the book. In other words, Chinese characters are a lot less complicated than
they first might appear — if one understands the basic logic behind them.

21
Important note

Most Chinese words consist of two or more characters

in that one Chinese character is not always the same thing as one word. A Chinese
character acts as a meaning unit which is in most cases combined with other characters
to form words. A very general and simple example would be the following:

电视 television
电脑 computer

电 electricity 视 vision 脑 brain

Electricity then is 电力 (电 electricity and 力 power), vision is 视力 (视 vision and 力 power)
and brain is 头脑 (头 head and 脑 brain).

There are many verbs, nouns, prepositions and other parts of speech that do consist of
only one character, but the majority of words in Chinese, as mentioned above, don’t.

22
How to use this book

You can read this book in two ways. You can either read it as though it were a novel, from
cover to cover, enjoying the pre-designed sequence in which the characters appear or
you may use it as a reference book and look up characters in any way you prefer.

The order of the entries is not random and it is designed to facilitate your learning process.
As mentioned in the Understanding how Chinese characters work chapter, individual
entries in this book are grouped into four main categories according to character type in
the following order: pictograms, simple indicative characters, semantic compounds and
phono-semantic compounds. Within each group, the entries are arranged, roughly, from
those that are easiest to understand to those that are the most difficult.

Generally, an entry looks like this:

53
It consists of:

1. The entry character, which is shown in large font at the top of the entry. If the character
has a traditional and simplified version, we chose the traditional version to be the large
entry character. The reason for this is that it is much easier to understand a given
character this way. With that said, the Simplified character, if there is one, is also an
integral part of the entry and is treated with equal importance.

2. The pronunciation and meaning is listed below the entry character. If a character has
several pronunciations, each pronunciation goes on a new line. If one pronunciation
of the character has several meanings, each meaning goes on a new line under the
same pronunciation. A meaning might be specified within the same line with synonyms,
separated by commas. If you are unfamiliar with the Mandarin Chinese phonetic
transcription system used in the entries, please refer to the Pronunciation guide in this
book

3. In addition, most entries, except for the most simple ones, have an explanation which
gives additional information to clarify and provide understanding of the entry character.

Depending on the type of the character, the entries may also contain:

4. The character changes bar, which shows how the entry character has changed. It
usually shows three characters, but in some cases only one and in some cases four:

回 回
Original Modern

The character labeled ‘original’ is the most relevant earlier version of the character on
which the modern character (labeled ‘modern’) is directly based on. The character in the
middle represents an intermediary step between the two character versions and is usually
the Seal script version of the given character.

The transition from Traditional to Simplified, if there is one, is also displayed in the
character changes bar:

马 馬 Modern
马 Modern
Original
traditional simplified

54
5. The Character components. If the character is made of only one component, the
entire entry is in black and no colors are applied. If the character is made of several
components, these are shown in colors. Meaning components are highlighted mostly
in green and blue:

Sound components are shown in orange:

55
Colors also show up in the pronunciation and meaning below the large size entry character
and other parts of the entry connecting character components visually to relevant meanings
or pronunciations.

Special markers ( ) and [ ] are sometimes used to facilitate character understanding.

Please refer to the Character transformations chapter for more information about these.

6. Lastly, in a few cases the Character changes bar is replaced by a Character formation
bar. It doesn’t show the historical evolution of the given character, only its structural
formation:

56
Pictograms
 人
rén people, person

A simplified picture of a person.

人 人
Original Modern

60
 女
nǚ woman, female

A simplified picture of a woman kneeling.

女 女
Original Modern

61
 子
zǐ child, offspring
zi noun suffix

A simplified picture of a child with spread-out hands.

子 子
Original Modern

62
 回
huí to return, to revolve
to come back
to answer

Original meaning ‘to revolve’, later extended to: to return, to

revolve. A picture of a spiral indicating a revolving motion (see
original character).

回 回
Original Modern

76
 能
néng able, capable
ability, capability

Original meaning ‘bear’. A simplified picture of a bear (see

original character). The character is a sound loan. No relation
to the modern 厶 月 or 匕 characters.

能 能
Original Modern

90
 Semantic
compounds
 分
fēn to divide, to separate
fraction
minute
fèn part, share, component

Written as the characters for to divide and knife. To divide

something with a knife. To divide. To separate.

108
 外
wài outside

Written as the characters for dusk and divination. An evening

divination ritual performed outside, indicating the meaning
outside.

110
 因
yīn because
cause, reason

Original meaning ‘mattress’. The character is a sound loan.

Written as the characters for enclosure (here representing the

mattress) and person indicating the original meaning of the
character ‘mattress’.

121
 出
chū to go out, to exit

Originally written as the character for foot and enclosure (see

original character). A person coming out of an enclosed space.
To exit. Character components fused in the modern character.

Original Modern

134
 有
yǒu to have, to possess
there is, there are

Originally written as the character for hand and meat

suggesting the meaning to have (see original character).
Character components simplified in the modern character.

Original Modern

135
 為
wèi because of, for
wéi to act as, to serve as

Original meaning probably ‘hard labor’ later extended to: labor

→ conduct → behavior.

Originally a picture of a hand on the left and an elephant on

the right (see original character). An elephant aiding workers
in hard labor. Character components fused and simplified in
the modern character.

Modern Modern
Original
Traditional Simplified

141
 我
wǒ I, me

Original meaning ‘three-bladed spear’. The character is a

sound loan.

Originally a picture of a three-bladed spear, with three blades

on the left and the character for spear, weapon on the right
(see original character). Character components fused and
simplified in the modern character.

Original Modern

143
 者
zhě the person who, that which, he who

Original meaning probably ‘to cook’. The character is a sound

loan.

Originally probably a picture of a cooking pot with steam

coming out of it. Character components simplified in the modern
character. No relation to the modern 日 or 曰 characters.

Original Modern

144
 民
mín people, nation
citizen

Interpretation uncertain. Original meaning probably ‘slave,

servant’.

Originally a picture of an eye with a knife close to it symbolizing

the blinding of slaves in ancient China (see original character).
Character components fused and simplified in the modern
character. Relation to modern meanings unclear.

Original Modern

146
Phono-semantic
compounds
 把
bǎ to take, to hold
classifier for objects with a handle

Character components:

Meaning component
hand

Sound component
bā

160
 到
dào to arrive at
to (place)
until (time)

Character components:

Meaning component
to arrive

Sound component
dāo

161
 國
guó country, state
surname Guo

Character components:

Meaning component
city walls

Sound component
huò
Arbitrarily replaced by 玉 in the Simplified character.

國 国
Traditional Simplified

174
 裡
lǐ in, inside of, interior

Original meaning inner part of a garment extended to inside.

Character components:

Meaning component
clothing

Sound component
lǐ

裡 里
Traditional Simplified

197
 打
dǎ to strike, to hit, to beat
dá dozen
(dǐng)

Character components:

Meaning component
hand

Sound component
dīng

220
 地
dì ground, land
de adverbial marker

Character components:

Meaning component
earth, soil

Sound component
(yí)

221
 他
tā he, she, it
[gē]

Character components:

Meaning component
person

Sound component
[gē]

230
 的
de possessive particle
adjectival suffix
dì aim, goal
dí really, truly
(zhuó)

Original meaning white and bright. The character is a sound

loan.
Character components:

Meaning component
white

Sound component
(zhuó)

240
 更
gèng more, further
gēng to change, to replace

Originally written as:

Meaning component
to hit, to beat
to hit → to cause sb. to change by force → to change

Sound component
bǐng

Original Modern

249
 書
shū book, letter, document

Originally written as:

Meaning component
hand holding a brush

Sound component
zhū

Modern Modern
Original
Traditional Simplified

252
 年
nián year

Original meaning to harvest grain possibly extended to:

harvest once a year → year.

Originally written as:

Meaning component
grain

Sound component
qiān

Original Modern

254
 表
biǎo to show, to express, to display
norm, standard
form, table

Original meaning outer side of a garment extended to: that

what is on the outside → showing → to show.

Originally written as:

Meaning component
clothing

Sound component
máo

Original Modern

255
 要
yào to want
to must
important
yāo demand, request

Original meaning person’s waist. The character is a sound

loan.

Originally written as:

Meaning component
hands
woman
A woman holding her waist.

Sound component
(nǎo)

Original Modern

267
人人人人
p. 60

人人人人人人人人

女女女女
p. 61

女女女女女女女女

子子子子
p. 62

子子子子子子子子

1
日日日日
p. 63

日日日日日日日日

月月月月
p. 64

月月月月月月月月

立立立立
p. 65

立立立立立立立立

2
美美美美
p. 66

美美美美美美美美

馬馬馬馬
p. 67

馬馬馬馬馬馬馬馬

马马马马
p. 67

马马马马马马马马

3
力力力力
p. 68

力力力力力力力力

十十十十
p. 69

十十十十十十十十

小小小小
p. 70

小小小小小小小小

4
工工工工
p. 71

工工工工工工工工

大大大大
p. 72

大大大大大大大大

心心心心
p. 73

心心心心心心心心

5
中中中中
p. 74

中中中中中中中中

生生生生
p. 75

生生生生生生生生

回回回回
p. 76

回回回回回回回回