Character Development

There are no letters in Chinese characters. With languages like English, letters help us sound words out. Even if we don’t know what a word means in English, we can usually make a pretty good guess as to how it should be pronounced. Chinese words don’t usually have components that tell you how the word is pronounced. Sometimes there are parts of characters that give you a hint as to how a character might be pronounced, but not always. Depending on the Chinese dialect, the same character can be pronounced in very different ways depending on the dialect. Some characters can even be pronounced in different ways in the same dialect depending on how the character is being used.

For over 2000 years, people all over China wrote Chinese characters in the same way. There were different styles, of course, sort of like different character fonts in English.  Even if you couldn’t speak the same Chinese dialect with someone, at least you could write notes. In the first two decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese government decided to simplify many of the characters to make the Chinese language more accessible to the masses.

Every Chinese character occupies the same amount of space when characters are used together. Whether a chinese character has one stroke like the number one（一）or 17 strokes like the traditional character for dragon（龍）, it occupies the same sized imaginary square. Even though each character represents only one sound syllable, sometimes “words” in Chinese are made of two or more characters. The word for “almost” (chàbuduō) 差不多 is made of of the three separate characters. When writing a sentence in Chinese, there is no spacing between words, only between characters.

Traditionally, Chinese was written vertically, from up to down and from right to left and there were no punctuation marks. Today, much of written Chinese is written horizontally from left to right. Western style punctuation is also very commonly used.

Chinese characters are made up of strokes. There are 6 basic strokes:

Héng (橫) –horizontal line

Shù, (竪) – vertical line

Diǎn (點/点) –a dot; sometimes a dab

Tí (提) – a rising stroke from bottom left to top right

Piě (撇) – slanted line from top right to bottom left

Nà (捺) – slanted line from top left to bottom right

There are also many modifications and combinations of basic strokes and there are rules for the order of writing strokes. Here are 3 common examples:

Horiontal trokes are always written from left to right

Vertical strokes are always written from top to bottom

Horizontal strokes are written before vertical strokes

Chinese Odyssey 3

Yet I knew right away

that the note was for me

It made perfect sense

with no A, B, or C

It said, “You’ll never find me

by digging through ground

The only way here is

straight up and around”