Serie Intro
During my stay here in Germany I have discussed the chinese writing system with couple of people and their questions have inspired me to think and learn more about my own language. Sounds ironic 
but it’s true, which leads me to think about it in the eyes of the westerners.
I’ve always believed Chinese is one of the most beautiful written languages of ours. It is NOT that complicated to read or write as it seemed, once you get the basic ideas of the characters. It takes some memory works at the beginning but you can see the picturesque background of them along the way during its transition through thousands of years, which is pretty fun. And soon you will be able to read the chinese characters on spa ads or tasty asian restaurants on the streets, and show it off to your friends! Which is exactly what I am trying to achieve here.
Chinese “Alphabet”
This is the first of a serie of posts about chinese characters. And by the way, Han/汉字 (pronounce) is the way to say it.
One of the most interesting question that I have come across is that, “how many keys are there in a chinese keyboard?”
- 20000.
Of course not . If you see the letter or the alphabet as the basic composing unit of every word, there are only 6 of them in Chinese and they are called Stroke or Bi/hua/r 笔画.
Unlike indo-european languages, though, they don’t carry the sound, but they are the basic units and every Hanzi is written as a combination of different Bihuar’s.
They are
一(Heng 横, “horizontal”),
丨(Shu 竖, “vertical”),
丿(Pie 撇),
㇏(Na 捺),
丶(Dian’r 点, “point”) and
乛(Zhe 折, “bend”) .
So much for theories, let’s put them into practice.
Let’s first examine 汉字 (“Chinese character”, ).
As you can see, they can be divided into Bihuar’s. 汉 consists of 5 画 (Hua, “stroke”) and 字 6. Think of them as letters so the concept fits better in your brain.
The Bihuar’s are not written just in the left-to-right direction like indo-european languages. Basic takeaway is: up to down, left to right. I’ll explain it later but if you wonder how 汉字 (Hanzi) is written, here it is:
As you can see, each Bihuar is written in one stroke, like the letters.
And the relation of Bihuar and 汉字(Hanzi) ARE quasi that of letters and words. Because each 汉字(Hanzi) IS quasi a word: they have their own meaning. You write letters together to form a word to express a meaning, and you write Bihuar’s together to form a 汉字(Hanzi) to do the same.
So here, 汉(Han) refers to the Han Chinese ethnic group (which by the way, has big stars like Jacky Chen and Bruce Lee) and 字(Zi) means character. Every single character is a 汉字 or shortly, 字.
And when combined, they form a 词 (Ci, word). (Maybe “phrase” is better?) Have I just said each 字 is a word? Well I said “quasi’. 字(Zi) does have its own meaning but it sounds by itself a bit too short so people would rather say two or more 字s together to also express a meaning. Think of 汉字 “Chinese character”, people do that in English too. Sometimes two 字s with similar meaning form a 词 to express also the meaning, and sometimes two 字s with different meanings (Like “apple tree”).
So that’s it for now. I hope that you liked it, and that Hanzi’s are now already more systematic to you.
Summary
- Classes of Bihuar’s
- From Bihuar to Hanzi
- Basic writing sequence
- From Hanzi to Ci
- Example of 汉字 (Hanzi)
