Learning Chinese Characters

For people who learn Chinese outside of a formal course or degree, the choice of whether they learn characters with their initial studies is up to them. Many people have asked me whether they need to learn characters straight away, and the answer to this I think is dependent on your reasons for learning Chinese.

When I first came to China I took lessons throughout the year in Chinese as understanding what people were saying to me was somewhat of a priority. By the end of the year I was reasonably happy with my progress and could understand most day to day things I needed as well as being able to carry out simple conversation. Despite this I didn’t know a single Chinese character. For me at that time I wanted to focus on my oral and my listening, which to be quite honest is hard enough. For those people who may only be in China for one year and who are looking to learn functional Chinese during their stay then I would advise not bothering too much with characters and focusing on spoken Chinese.

For people who are serious about learning Chinese though, and who may wish to continue their studies beyond one year in China, learning characters is a must. Only when you have a proper understanding of Chinese characters and their myriad meanings can you really understand the language. It is generally accepted that a knowledge of 2500-3000 characters is entirely sufficient to read any written work you are likely to encounter. To those new to the language this is slightly misleading though, as whilst this might not seem like a massive mountain to climb, in reality if you do learn these commonly-used characters you still need to learn the tens of thousands of words that can be made with these characters.

As well as their importance in fully coming to grips with the Chinese language another aspect of learning characters that has made an impact on me is how fascinating they can be to study. One aspect of this is in the genesis of the characters themselves. Originating from pictograms thousands of years ago the forms of many characters today still bear a close relation to the meaning they carry. A common example of this is 木(mu) meaning tree or wood.  From there if we have two together we have the character林 (lin) meaning forest.  Finally three together gives us the character 森 (sen) also meaning forest, though generally in a more densely wooded sense.

Whilst not all characters still bear this same visual relation to their meaning, nonetheless when you learn more of their meanings it becomes easier to guess new words from their component characters. For example if you know that the character 电 (dian) means electricity and that 脑 (nao) means brain then it is not the greatest leap of imagination to guess that together电脑 means computer (literally ‘electric brain’). Another basic example would be the character 飞 (fei) meaning ‘to fly’ and 机 (ji) which amongst other things means machine. Thus together we have the word 飞机 aeroplane (‘flying machine’).

For the student who has begun to study Chinese, characters can seem hopelessly complex and nonsensical, and for those who only wish to be able to get by during their stay in China perhaps it is easier not to learn them. Yet for those people who are interested in seriously studying Chinese, the study of characters is not only a necessity but also an immensely rewarding endeavour.