Chinese Characters

The Chinese characters constitute one of mankind’s oldest systems of writing, and have the most users in the world. There are numerous Chinese characters, totaling about 60 000, with about 6 000 basic ones. Chinese characters have a long history. It derived from the pictorial recording of events, known as hieroglyph. The earliest Chinese characters discovered up to now are jiaguwen(ancient Chinese characters inscribed on tortoise shells or animal bones),dating back 3 400 years, which were already mature characters.

Chinese characters have undergone tremendous changes over the ages. From the earliest form of hieroglyph to the more advanced symbol character composed of strokes, it has experienced a process of jiaguwen, jinwen (ancient language used in inscription on ancient bronze objects),xiaozhuan(small seal character),lishu(official script),and kaishu(regular script).

There are mainly four ways of creating a word as follows:

Hieroglyph refers to the method by drawing the profile of the involved subject, such as 月which looks like a curve moon.

Self-explanatory characters are made up by adding self-explanatory symbols on pictographs, or totally made up of symbols, such as 刃（blade）,which is made up by adding a point on the cutting edge of a knife, pointing out the position of the blade.

Associative compounds are combination of two or more symbols to represent a new character with a new meaning. For instance, the character明（bright）is composed by 日（sun）and 月（moon）.Definitely, it will be bright when the sun and the moon appear in the same place.

Pictophonetic method is a word-formation method combining one element of a character indicating meaning and the other, pronunciation, into a new word. Form element indicates the word’s meaning and characteristic. Phonetic element indicates the pronunciation of the word. For example,湖(lake) is composed of three dots indicating water, and 胡indicating the pronunciation.

For thousands of years, Chinese people had been writing in Complex Chinese Characters (traditional Chinese).however, the Complex Chinese Characters are difficult to identify, memorize and write due to their complicated strokes. From 1949, for the sake of the popularization of education, the Chinese government simplified the Chinese Characters on a large scale. There were more than 2 000 Complex Chinese Characters that were simplified to today’s appearance. Nowadays the simplified Chinese Characters is one of the official characters used by the UN.

In history, Chinese characters were borrowed by Korea, Japan, and Vietnam for a long time. It has been borne out that Chinese characters are of vigorous vitality.