1.1 What a Character Is — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say what a character is: one block, one syllable, usually one unit of meaning. Tell a character apart from a word , and say why a three-character word is one word. Read a line of Chinese knowing the spaces you look for are not there. Count the characters and the words in one sentence, and get two numbers on purpose. Prerequisites : 0.8, where the pinyin table was completed. Every new character below comes with its pinyin, which you need to be able to read. Start at 0.8 Sounds and Tones if any of it has gone hazy. The volume you have just finished was about sound. This one is about writing, and it opens with a piece of bookkeeping that sounds dull and is not. Nearly every wrong idea an English speaker forms about written Chinese starts with one confusion: treating a character as if it were a word. Separate the two and a page of Chinese acquires joints; leave them joined and every count you make is wrong. This volume does two jobs. Its first eight lessons, 1.1 to 1.8, and lesson 1.12 supply the machinery: what a character is, how it is built, how it was invented and simplified, which traditional forms you will also meet, and how to write, type and look up characters, including ones you cannot read. Lessons 1.9 to 1.11, and 1.13 to 1.17 at the start of the second phase, build a stock of characters fifty at a time, in order of frequency, and later phases take the lists further. Alongside them the vocabulary, conversation and reading lessons put the characters to work inside sentences you want to say. One syllable, one square A character occupies a notional square, and every character gets the same square, whether it is one horizontal line or a dense assembly of eighteen strokes. This is why practice paper is ruled into grids rather than lines: the grid is the unit. Each square is said as one syllable, with one of the tones you have just spent eight lessons on. Two characters, two syllables; seven characters, seven syllables. No character is said as two syllables and none is silent, so nothing resembles the English gap between through and a . The one common exception is the curled suffix 儿 of lesson 0.7, which melts into the syllable before it, so 没事儿 is three squares and two beats. Otherwise this gives you a free check: read a six-character line aloud, and if it comes out as five beats, two squares have run together. Most characters also carry a unit of meaning, and here the hedging starts. 人 rén is one syllable meaning "person". But 的 de means nothing you could draw: it is a grammatical particle, roughly the possessive of English. Take the rule as "one square, one syllable, usually one unit of meaning", and expect the third part to leak. The characters Four characters to begin with, among the most frequent in this course's corpus. Say each syllable with its tone while looking at the square, and do not hunt for a picture: some were pictures three thousand years ago, and few still look like them now. Character Meaning Notes 我 zh wǒ I; me One form for both, whether subject or object. 是 zh shì am; is; are One unchanging form for every subject and every time. 人 zh rén person; people Two strokes, and the one square here that still looks a little like its meaning. 的 zh de a particle linking a possessor to what it possesses Toneless. Now watch what two more squares do. 中 zhōng is "middle" and 国 guó is "country"; together, 中国 Zhōngguó names China. Add 人 and you have 中国人 Zhōngguórén, a Chinese person: three squares, three syllables, one word. That word is where this lesson earns its keep. Chinese English Squares and words 我是中国人。 [1] I am Chinese. five characters, three words 你是中国人吗？ [2] Are you Chinese? six characters, four words 我不是中国人。 [3] I am not Chinese. six characters, four words In the first, the squares are 我 , 是 , 中 , 国 and 人 ; the words are "I", "am" and "Chinese person". They do not line up, and nothing on the page marks the joint. A reader knows 中国人 belongs together because they know the word, not because the writing says so. Characters combine into words Words in modern Chinese are mostly one or two characters long, with a small minority of three. The two-character compound is the workhorse, built the way English builds greenhouse : two meaningful pieces welded into one item whose sense is related to the parts but is not their sum, since a greenhouse need not be green. The pieces are reused, and that is what makes the mountain climbable: a character you learn well is a component of dozens of words. 人 appears in the words for "guest", "adult" and every nationality. So any claim about how much Chinese somebody knows must be stated carefully. Two thousand characters is a figure about squares; twenty thousand words is a figure about vocabulary. Neither converts into the other. Word Meaning Built from 中国 zh Zhōngguó （ 中國 ） China Built from middle plus country. 中国人 zh Zhōngguórén （ 中國人 ） a Chinese person Built from China plus person. 中文 zh Zhōngwén the Chinese language Built from middle, standing for China, plus writing. 汉字 zh hànzì （ 漢字 ） a Chinese character Built from Han plus character. Nothing marks where a word ends Chinese is written without spaces between words. Punctuation exists and behaves much as you expect, with a comma, a full stop written as a small hollow circle, and question and exclamation marks. Between one word and the next, nothing. This is the hardest habit to acquire. Reading English, you are handed the word boundaries free. In Chinese that labour is yours, and at first you will do it badly: you will group two squares from different words, miss two that belong together, and lose the sentence. The cure is not cleverness but vocabulary. Once 中国人 is something you know, you see one shape where you used to see three. Chinese English 我在学汉字。 [4] I'm learning Chinese characters. 我的汉语不太好。 [5] My Chinese isn't very good. How This Differs from English English writing represents sounds. The letters of cat stand for three consecutive noises and nothing else