How does chinese writing work

It enables you to type almost any language that uses the Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets, and is free. If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon , or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living. Note : all links on this site to Amazon. This means I earn a commission if you click on any of them and buy something.

So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site. How the Chinese writing system works The illustrations below of the various ways the character for horse is used in Chinese give you an idea of how the Chinese script works. In some languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and German, almost every letter represents only one sound.

Although not everyone agrees on how to compare the consistencies between letters and sounds across languages, researchers generally agree that Finnish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, Serbo-Croat, Turkish, and Korean are relatively shallow or consistent orthographies, while Portuguese, French, and Danish contain more inconsistent mappings between phonemes and graphemes.

English is the most inconsistent language in the world! Now, let us talk about non-alphabetic orthographies. Non-alphabetic orthographies represent either the syllable for example, Cherokee, Tamil, or Japanese Kana or a one-syllable unit of meaning as in Chinese, Japanese Kanji with each symbol. Similar to the alphabetic orthographies, a unit of spoken language is represented by a symbol, but in the non-alphabetic orthographies, unlike the alphabetic ones, that unit of spoken language is larger than just a phoneme.

Chinese is often referred to as a pictograph a language made up of pictures , because people think that the characters are pictures of the words they represent. In fact, very few Chinese characters are actually pictures of the words they represent. Rather, in Chinese, the symbols represent a unit of pronunciation a syllable that is also a unit of meaning a morpheme , thus Chinese is considered a morpho-syllabic writing system.

A phonetic radical is just one part of the character that provides a clue as to how to say the word. You can see examples of Chinese and Tamil in Figure 1.

As we can see, there are some things that are the same about all orthographies, and there are some things that are different between orthographies. All orthographies represent spoken language with written symbols. Yet, the portion of spoken language that is coded and the consistency of the mappings between sounds and symbols differs across orthographies. Next, we will explore how these similarities and differences affect reading skills, and see how the brain reads different languages.

How quickly and how well children learn to read differs across languages. Some of these differences are because of the characteristics of the writing system [ 2 ].

One large study compared children learning to read across 14 different alphabetic orthographies and found that, by the end of Grade 1, children learning to read in shallow orthographies, such as Spanish, Finnish, and Greek, made fewer mistakes when reading and read faster than children learning to read in more inconsistent orthographies, such as Danish and English [ 2 ].

Some of the differences in learning to read across languages might be because children are taught to read differently in different countries. But, research studies overwhelmingly support the idea that learning to read is easier in consistent orthographies than in inconsistent orthographies.

English readers take longer to learn to read than readers in almost all other alphabetic orthographies, and Chinese readers take even longer [ 3 ]. Children who have great difficulty learning to read may have a learning problem known as developmental dyslexia. Children with dyslexia are not able to read as well as other kids who are the same age.

Also, their difficulties with reading are not because of poor teaching, poor sight or hearing, or because of other brain disorders. Children with dyslexia, in any language, have a hard time converting written symbols into the sounds they represent [ 3 ]. This skill is called phonological decoding. However, the degree that problems with phonological decoding interferes with reading differs across languages.

Children with dyslexia in consistent orthographies, such as German, Spanish and Italian, can read words correctly, showing that they have good phonological decoding skills, but they tend to be very slow readers. In contrast, problems with phonological decoding affect reading greatly in inconsistent orthographies, such as English. Children with dyslexia in English tend to make a lot of mistakes when reading words [ 3 ].

Children with dyslexia in Chinese, a non-alphabetic language, also have problems with phonological decoding, which can affect reading. Chinese readers who have problems with phonological decoding might not be able to use the phonetic radicals within a Chinese character as a clue to help with pronouncing that word. Traditional characters are more difficult to learn and more complicated to write — although also undoubtedly more aesthetically-pleasing.

The exception to this is if you go to KTV Chinese karaoke on the mainland — many of the songs are subtitled with traditional characters because they are imported from Taiwan! Simplified characters are also used by some overseas Chinese communities, notably in Malaysia and Singapore.

In a word, yes. There is an official form of romanisation called pinyin that even young Chinese use as an aid to learning. You will also have trouble understanding a text written only in pinyin. If you want to learn Chinese, you are going to have to learn the characters!

By practising!