Chinese characters, also called Hanzi, are the oldest continuously used writing system in the world. Unlike the Roman alphabets, Chinese characters are used to illustrate meaning rather than sound. That’s why learning to read Chinese requires a lot of memorization.To get more news about chinese alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.

There are over 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them all precisely. However, the good news is, for language learners, knowing just 2,000 to 3,000 characters will give you the tools to read most newspapers and magazines. Character Composition: The composition of Chinese characters follows a certain system. Most of the characters consist of two components, one phonetic component and one symbolic component (as can be found in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 12th rows of the table below). The phonetic component indicates how a character is pronounced, and the symbolic component signifies the meaning of the character. For example, the character 姐 on the 2nd row consists of two components: on the left is the symbolic component “女”, meaning “female, woman”; on the right is the phonetic component “且”, with the pronunciation “qie”. The meaning of the character is “big sister”. Radicals are the essential components of Chinese characters. For example, in the Chinese character 你 (meaning “you”), the left part 亻is a radical that evolved from the earliest visual representation of a person. Radicals are often used to illustrate meanings. In the example of the character 你 , the radical 亻indicates “person”. Eighty-four percent of the Chinese characters contain radicals, which will help you decode and comprehend the Chinese easily.

When learning to write Chinese characters, a good first step in making the task less intimidating is identifying strokes. A basic stroke is a single calligraphic mark moving in one direction across a writing surface. Here are some basic strokes.