中文

Introduction

This section is intended as an introduction and aid to help recognize Chinese characters in the lexicon. Chinese language uses a logographic script composed of visual elements arranged in a variety of ways, rather than the segmental phoneme principle of construction used in alphabetic languages. Its logograms or ideograms are known as characters which in turn can be decomposed into components called radicals. The most commonly accepted table of radicals for traditional Chinese characters consists of 214 entries which were popularized in the reign of Qing emperor Kangxi (1716 AD), who commissioned what is now known as the Kangxi Zidian, a character dictionary listing 47,035 entries. The most comprehensive dictionary available to date is the Zhonghua Zihai which was published in 1994 and lists 85,568 characters.

Note however that just about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy (e.g., to read a Chinese newspaper) and a well-educated person will know around 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Whilst some radicals are characters in their own right, most are not, but learning them will enable one to recognize these radicals which in turn will help in the learning and recognition of other characters. Some radicals have more than one form: they may be used as side-radicals or have a variant or simplified form. If applicable, this is also listed below. Chinese was  traditionally written vertically, i.e. from top to bottom, due to the fact that prior to the invention of paper, books in Ancient China were written on strips of flattened bamboo, joined together with thread into long rows that could be rolled up into cylinders and wrapped in cloth. Then later on, it was also written from right to left, though in 1954, the official writing system changed and is nowadays from left to right, along with the movement from Traditional to Simplified characters. See also Chinese Character Formation & Etymology and Comparative Language List. 回

Radicals

Numerals

 

一 ..... 1 二 ..... 2 三 ..... 3 四 ..... 4 五 ..... 5

六 ..... 6 七 ..... 7 八 ..... 8 九 ..... 9 十 ..... 10

Phonetic Transcription (Zhuyin)

~ Consonants

 

ㄗ	ㄓ	ㄐ	ㄍ	ㄉ	ㄅ
z	zh	j	g	d (t)	b (p)
ㄘ	ㄔ	ㄑ	ㄎ	ㄊ	ㄆ
c	ch	q	k	t	p (ph)
ㄙ	ㄕ	ㄒ	ㄏ	ㄋ	ㄇ
s	sh	x (s)	h	n	m
	ㄖ			ㄌ	ㄈ
	r			l	f

~ Vowels
	ㄦ	ㄢ	ㄞ	ㄚ	ㄧ / l
	er (eu)	an	ai	a	i
		ㄣ	ㄟ	ㄛ	ㄨ
		en (eun)	ei (eij)	o	u (oe)
		ㄤ	ㄠ	ㄜ	ㄩ
		ang	ao	e (eu)	u (yu/ü)
		ㄥ	ㄡ	ㄝ
		eng/ong/-ng	ou (ow)	e

Tones (marks or digits)

Mandarin Chinese has five tones. These tones are the high level tone; high rising tone; low falling-rising tone; high falling tone; and the neutral tone. To represent these tones the pinyin system uses either diacritics or adds a digit to the end of each individual syllable. The number used for each tone is as the order listed below, except for the neutral tone which is usually not numbered.

1. The High Level Tone is marked by a macron (ˉ): 妈 (mā/ma1) mother 2. The (High) Rising Tone is marked by an acute accent (ˊ): 麻 (má/ma2) hemp 3. The (Low) Falling-Rising is marked by a caron/háček (ˇ): 马 (mǎ/ma3) horse 4. The (High) Falling Tone is marked by a grave accent (ˋ): 骂 (mà/ma4) scold 5. The Neutral Tone is represented without any accent mark: 吗 (ma) question particle

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