I bet you’re beginning to wonder just how the Chinese have managed to communicate with each other for the better part of five millennia if their spoken language comes in so many distinct forms and dialects. The answer lies in (drum roll) . . . the written word.
Say you see two Chinese people sitting next to each other on a train traveling from Canton to Shanghai. If the Cantonese speaker reads the newspaper out loud, the guy from Shanghai won’t have a clue what he’s saying. But if they both read the same newspaper article to themselves, they could understand what’s going on in the world. That’s because Chinese characters are uniform all across the country.
Chinese words are written in beautiful, often symbolic configurations called characters. Each character is a word in and of itself, and sometimes it’s a part of a compound word. It makes no difference if you write the characters from right to left, left to right, or top to bottom, because you can read and understand them in any order. If you see a Chinese movie in Chinatown, you can often choose between two types of subtitles: English, which you read from left to right, and Chinese characters on another line, which you read from right to left. (They can also go from left to right, so be careful.) You may go cross-eyed for a while trying to follow them both.
During the Han dynasty, a lexicographer named Xu Shen identified six ways in which Chinese characters reflected meanings and sounds. Of these, four were the most common:
Pictographs: These characters are formed according to the shape of the objects themselves, such as the sun and the moon. They show the meaning of the character rather than the sound. Ideographs: These characters represent more abstract concepts. The characters for “above” and “below,” for example, each have a horizontal line representing the horizon and another stroke leading out above or below the horizon. Complex ideographs: Combinations of simpler characters. Phonetic compounds: Also called logographs, these compound characters are formed by two graphic elements — one hinting at the meaning of the word and the other providing a clue to the sound. Phonetic compounds account for over 80 percent of all Chinese characters.
No matter which type of characters you see, you won’t find any letters stringing them together like you see in English. So how in the world do Chinese people consult a Chinese dictionary? (How did you know I could read your mind?) In several different ways.
Because Chinese characters are composed of several (often many) strokes of the writing brush, one way to look up a character is by counting the number of strokes and then looking up the character under the portion of the dictionary that notes characters by strokes. But to do so, you have to know which radical to check under first. Chinese characters have 214 radicals — parts of the character that can help identify what the character may signify, such as three dots on the left hand side of the character representing water. Each radical is itself composed of a certain number of strokes, so you have to first look up the radical by the number of strokes it takes to write it, and after you locate that radical, you start looking once more under the number of strokes left in the character after that radical to locate the character you wanted to look up in the first place.
You can always just check under the pronunciation of the character (if you already know how to pronounce it), but you have to sift through every single character with the same pronunciation. You also have to look further under the various tones to see which one of all the words pronounced the same way comes with the first, second, third, or fourth tone you want to locate. And because there are so many homonyms in Chinese, this task isn’t as easy as it may sound (no pun intended).
I bet you feel really relieved that you’re only focusing on spoken Chinese and not the written language.
