6 ways of forming Chinese characters

Did you know that there are only 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

Yes, 6 types of Chinese characters make up the 50,000 Chinese characters in existence today.

Amazing is not it?

This shows that there is a logical system of symbols used to create Chinese characters. That are not only made up of random lines and strokes.

Once you know these 6 types of Chinese characters, you will find that learning Chinese writing is not so difficult after all.

Ah, another thing ...

The "radical"

No, they have nothing to do with extremists or terrorists.)

They are the "root elements" of Chinese characters. The meaning part of Chinese characters. There are 214 of them and they exist independently or as part of complex characters.

Once a general idea of the common radicals, you can guess the meaning of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese dictionaries are organized by radicals - starting with the radicals of one stroke, two, three and so on, and Hanyu Pinyin, the romanization system of modern China.

Knowing the radicals and the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters, you can almost guess the meaning and the sound of Chinese characters.

So, what are the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

The first Chinese characters about 4,000 years ago were shaped like the things they represented. Known as "pictograms", these were the images of humans, animals and natural objects, such as the "Sun", "mother", "bird", "food", etc.

There are only 300 more pictograms but they form the building blocks of modern Chinese writing.

To create more words, symbols were added to form a pictogram "ideograms". For example, adding a horizontal stroke, "timber" has become "root" and "mouth" has become "sweet".

Later, two or more pictographs were combined to form "composite characters". It is "more sense meaning" words. For example, "man" added 人 "tree" 木 forms the Chinese character "rest" 休 - a man leaning against a tree. And three characters for "wood" 木 森 together to make a "forest".

This way of forming Chinese characters showing the creativity of the ancient Chinese, but could not produce a lot of Chinese characters easily.

"Characters borrowed" came into being. This means that a Chinese character with the same sound as another was borowed to form new characters without regard to its meaning.

The result? New characters with the same sound but different meanings are formed. For example, the Chinese character for 北 "north" showed two people "back to back" and originally meant just that.北 The original character was borrowed to represent a direction, while the sound remained unchanged.

But what happened to the original meanings of these characters borrowed? In order to retain their original meaning, a meaning component was added to the sound component. Then, using the same example, the character that means "back to back" was given a "flesh" 背 component so it can retain its original meaning.

As a result, "sound meaning" or phonetic compounds were formed. These are the Chinese characters with some audio and some of its meaning. Today, this type of Chinese characters make up 80% of Chinese characters in use.

The last type of Chinese characters is called character transferred.

Transferred characters share the same root and have the same meaning but their pronunciations are different. This is the least important of the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters.

So early Chinese characters were created based on meaning alone and started the photo.

Eventually, each Chinese character has become "a unity of sound and meaning," as we have today.

But it remains possible to guess the meaning of Chinese characters meaning the component, the radicals.