So as you see: What are Chinese letters? It’s hard to answer. These make up the following initials, finals, and whole syllables:īut are these Chinese letters? They are rather roman letters representing the pronunciation of the Chinese characters. We could say Chinese Pinyin has 26 letters: Chinese characters, also known as Hanzi () are one of the earliest forms of written language in the world, dating back approximately five thousand years. This was needed for modern typewriters (good luck trying to fit 10,000 characters on a keyboard), as well as to benefit literacy by making learning Chinese easier. Pinyin was invented in the 1950s as a way to write out the pronunciation in roman characters. For this we can look at simple examples such aas 人Rén (Person), 山Shān (Mountain), and 水Shuǐ (Water).Ĭan we consider Pinyin as Chinese letters? Other Chinese characters are words though.Both characters have a meaning in themselves, but when put together they mimic the sound of ’sofa’ in English, and together mean sofa, so we call this a double syllable morpheme. 视Shì cannot stand on its own, yet has the meaning of ‘vision’. An example from Chinese is 视Shì, as in 电视Diànshì (Television) or 视觉Shìjué (Visual).The ‘ish’ cannot stand on its own, yet it has meaning. An example from English is that ‘boy’ is a word but ‘ish’ (as in ‘boyish’) is a morpheme.The difference between a morpheme and a word is that the latter doesn’t always stand alone. Most Chinese agree that you need to know about 3000 characters to be considered fully literate. A modern and well-educated Chinese person may know 20,000 characters at best, but this is still a staggering number. And yet Chinese characters aren’t all words, nor are they letters. The extended Chinese character set (including ancient, seldom-used glyphs) includes upwards of 100,000 characters. ‘刚Gāng’ in Chinese means ‘just’ or ‘firm’, while the letter ‘G’ in English doesn’t mean anything. Even though these characters are a system of symbols used to write. Our say is that in themselves, Chinese characters aren’t really words nor letters, but rather morphemes. Unlike an alphabet that represents only sounds, Chinese characters express a concept. Some people don’t really agree whether Chinese characters are letters or words. Pinyin romanization, also spelled Pin-yin, also called Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, Chinese (Pinyin) Hanyu pinyin wenzi (Chinese-language combining-sounds. The journal publishes preliminary accounts in the whole field of chemistry, including inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, polymer chemistry, applied chemistry, etc. You saw how a letter is written and might be pronounced, but there is nothing better than hearing the sound of the letters in a video or audio.Chinese letters are an interesting thing, because we can split them into two parts: Chinese Hanzi characters and Chinese pinyin pronunciation. Chinese Chemical Letters (CCL) (ISSN 1001-8417) was founded in July 1990. The only difficulty is that each syllable exists in 4 tones, first tone is a level tone (doesn’t go up nor down), second tone rises as in a question, third tone goes down and then up as if you are surprised, and the fourth tone goes down as hen you are angry. This is not to difficult since Chinese words only exists out of one syllable, like wo (I 我 wǒ), ta (he 他 tā), da(big 大 dà). So you have to memorize the sound (pronunciation) of Chinese Characters, like you have to for numbers. And so it is in Chinese, Chinese write down the meaning not the sound. In other words in writing numerals you write down the meaning, not it’s sound. But you will understand that it is a collection of 5 items. Chinese characters are not letters (with some exceptions), Chinese characters represent. You can compare it with numbers, if you read 5, depending on what language you speak you will say five (English), quince (French), funf (German),vijf (Dutch), pito (Tagalog) etc. There is no Chinese alphabet in the sense we understand it in the West. The Pinyin Chinese alphabet symbols are also used to type characters into computers. Chinese AlphabetĬhinese has no alphabet, they use pictograms. The better you pronounce a letter in a word, the more understood you will be in speaking the Chinese language.īelow is a table showing some Chinese characters and how it is pronounced in English. For instance, is romanized as 'kungfu' in Wade-Giles, but 'gongfu' in Pinyin. An older system called Wade-Giles was used in the first half of the 20th century and it has left its mark on the English language. Without it, you will not be able to say words properly even if you know how to write those words. Pinyin is not the only system devised to transcribe Chinese sounds into roman letters. Learning the Chinese alphabet is very important because its structure is used in every day conversation.
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