Our later Chinese ancestors curved the character on tortoise-shell or bones, which is why we can still read it thousands of years later. Several historians see this as the predicessor of Chinese characters.ġ600BC ~ 1046BC: The oracle bones (甲骨文Jiǎgǔwén) But the meaning of the characters is not entirely clear. Because the signs are repeated over and over across several pots, this hints at the function of language. In the 20th century, inscriptions were found on pottery on several locations in China, such as in Banpo near Xi’an. 5000 BC ~ 4000BC: Neolithic signs in China The gods worried that after people learned to write, they would go into business and give up farming, causing famine.įrom there on, the history of characters can then be summarized into several periods. This is called the Gǔyǔ (谷雨Gǔyǔ literally means ‘grain rain’). It is said that when he created words, grain fell from the sky and the gods cried at night. He observed the footprints of birds and animals and was inspired to create words. He was a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor.Legend says that Cangjie had four eyes. According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie around 5000 years ago. The last type of character is a morpheme, which also has two parts, one of which represents the pronunciation of the character and the other part represents the meaning of the character, such as “河 (hé) “, where the left part means water and the right part represents the pronunciation of the character.Ĭhinese character are among the oldest characters in the world. For example, in “休 (xiū) “, there is a person on the left and a tree on the right, and the person is resting on the tree, which means “休”. The meaning of “旦” is the new day after the horizon rises.Ĭharacters are two different parts that create a new meaning.
For example, “刃 (rèn) ” is a point added to the mouth of a knife to point out the edge of the knife；”旦 (dàn) ” is a cross under the sun, which indicates the horizon. These are a pictograph with one or two strokes added to it to indicate the meaning of the other character being illustrated. For example, “日 (rì) ” is like a circle with a dot in the middle, like the shape of the sun when we look at it directly “月 (yuè) ” is like the shape of a moon “龟 (guī) ” is like the shape of a turtle on its side. Pictograms are based on the shape of an object and resemble pictures, so people know what they mean at a glance. We still roughly use these categories today. In ancient China, people used four types of characters: pictograms, referents, ideograms, and morphemes. And with ~1,000 Chinese characters, you can read 80% of Chinese media.ĭespite their complexity, Chinese characters are not without rules.With ~3,000 Chinese characters you can read 95% of conventional Chinese written language.The last two numbers are important for Mandarin learners:.And ~6,000 Chinese characters is the amount most normally educated Chinese people can recognize.But ~10,000 Chinese characters is the total amount of Hanzi a teacher at GoEast will know, or someone studying Chinese history, or linguistics or translators.>50,000 Hanzi characters is the total amount of Chinese characters in existence.Here’s a graph with some important numbers.
3 000 most common chinese characters flashcards how to#
Aside from learning them with GoEast’s Hanzi course, that is… Scroll down for the history, how to memorize and write Chinese characters. Hanzi, or Chinese characters, are easier to learn with the right study material and learning tips.
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