Lesson 1 What Are the Chinese Characters?
I. A First Look at the Chinese Characters
Many people in the world today regard hanzi as too complicated, like “little drawings” with a confusing number of crisscrossing sticks and randomly placed dots. Actually that is not the case, Hanzi have always been in use in a history of thousands of years (with significant changes in their forms of course). You may wonder how the writing system of hanzi has survived for so long and still managed to retain the beautiful calligraphy underneath all these little characters, but the more practical concern will be to learn to recognize and write the characters of hanzi efficiently. Here provides an innovative and convenient way of learning Chinese for those who are interested in hanzi and those who happen to be more or less fluent speakers of Chinese but do not have an opportunity to write hanzi.
II. Evolution of Hanzi Scripts
Like all other forms of writing, hanzi have evolved over the past several thousand years, and the following examples to show how the forms of hanzi have changed from ancient pictographs to the abstract characters nowadays. Hanzi in their earliest forms are very much like simple pictures, so you can easily guess at the meanings of the following characters. Let me show you some.
III. Basic Strokes of Hanzi
Now that we know what hanzi look like and how they have evolved in history, let’s take a look at how to write them. We first look into a representative hanzi and find out what are its basic components, because learning to write the basic strokes is a necessary step towards learning to write correct hanzi in general. 拔
There are thousands of different characters of hanzi, but you needn’t worry about that at all. If we take them apart, we can expose the basic strokes – the smallest components of hanzi.
There are eight basic strokes of hanzi:
Horizontal stroke 横
Vertical stroke 竖
Left-falling stroke 撇
Right-falling stroke 捺
Dot stroke 点
Rising stroke 提
Hook stroke 钩
Folding stroke 折
IV. Numbers in Hanzi
Let’s start with 3 simplest Chinese characters, which are all composed of horizontal strokes.
一．二．三
You have made your first step and written 3 Chinese characters. A small step but very important! How wonderful it would be if all Chinese characters were written so easily like this – but then things would get repetitive. Imagine the character of “thousand” were to be written this way, by adding all the strokes until the number reaches a thousand! Wouldn’t one be bored to death? Well, now let’s tackle something more challenging, for example, the number “four”.
四 Notice that the second stroke is a folding stroke.
五 The vertical stroke in the middle is slightly tilted to the left.
六．七 The horizontal stroke is tilted slightly up.
八．九．十
零 “O” is an informal version of “零” and often appears in numbers, e.g. 二OO八年, “O” is rounder than the Arabic number “0”.
百．千．万．亿
V. How to Read and Write Numbers in Chinese
A comparison of number units between Chinese and English
In most Western languages, numbers are read by tens, hundreds and thousands; numbers over one thousand are divided by commas every three digits from the right (decimal point) to the left, since the thousand is a key unit of counting. The first comma from the right indicates “thousand”, the second comma “million” and the third comma “billion”. In Chinese the numbers are read in a slightly different way. You may notice already that there is a word in Chinese the numbers are read in a slightly different way. You may notice already that there is a word in Chinese for “ten thousand” which sounds like “one” in English. It is 万, a key unit of counting in Chinese.
If you understand the Chinese way of counting numbers, you can easily read a Chinese number over ten thousand: Divide the number by groups of four digits from the right (decimal point), and then measure it with 万(ten thousand) and/or 亿(a hundred million).
