Chinese characters
Based on Wikipedia: Chinese characters
The Last Writing System Standing
Of the four times humans independently invented writing from scratch—in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica—only one of those original systems is still in daily use. Chinese characters have been written continuously for over three thousand years, making them not just a writing system but a living archaeological record of human thought.
That's worth pausing on. Cuneiform is a museum curiosity. Egyptian hieroglyphics require specialists to decode. Mayan glyphs were nearly lost entirely until scholars cracked them in the twentieth century. But Chinese characters? Someone in Shanghai is texting with them right now.
Pictures That Became Words
Every writing system begins the same way: with pictures. Draw a sun, everyone knows it means "sun." Draw a person with arms spread wide, and you've got "big." This is called proto-writing, and it has an obvious limitation—how do you draw "justice" or "tomorrow" or "perhaps"?
The breakthrough that transformed Chinese proto-writing into actual writing was something linguists call the rebus technique. Here's how it works: imagine you need to write the English word "belief." That's abstract—there's no picture for it. But you could draw a bee and a leaf. Bee-leaf. Belief. The sounds guide you to meaning, even though the pictures have nothing to do with the concept.
Ancient Chinese scribes did exactly this. When they needed to write words that couldn't be drawn, they borrowed characters with similar pronunciations. This is why learning Chinese characters isn't just about memorizing shapes—it's about understanding that every character carries echoes of both meaning and sound, layered over millennia of use.
Not an Alphabet, Not Quite Pictures
Chinese characters are logographs—each one represents a unit of meaning rather than a unit of sound. This is fundamentally different from alphabets, where letters represent phonemes (the distinct sounds in a language). When you see the letter "b," you think of a sound. When you see the character 水, you think of water.
But here's where it gets interesting: Chinese characters are also morphosyllabic, meaning each character typically represents both a morpheme (a unit of meaning) and a syllable of spoken language. In English, "unbreakable" contains three morphemes: un-, break, and -able. In Chinese, almost every morpheme gets its own character, and almost every character is exactly one syllable when spoken.
This creates a tight bond between the written and spoken language that doesn't exist in English. We can add syllables without adding meaning (think of how "understand" and "misunderstand" have the same number of syllables as "comprehend" and "miscomprehend," even though the prefix completely changes the meaning). Chinese is more economical: new meaning, new character, new syllable.
How Many Characters Are There?
The Unicode Standard—the international system that encodes text for computers—contains over one hundred thousand Chinese characters. That number is slightly terrifying, but it's also misleading.
Here's the reality: to read a newspaper comfortably, you need roughly two to three thousand characters. That's the working vocabulary of an educated reader. Many of those hundred thousand characters are historical variants, regional forms, rare classical terms, or specialized technical vocabulary that most native speakers would never encounter.
Think of it like English vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary contains over 170,000 words in current use, but a typical adult knows perhaps 20,000 to 35,000 of them. You don't need to know "defenestration" (the act of throwing someone out a window) to read the morning news, though it's a delightful word to have in your back pocket.
The Anatomy of a Character
Characters aren't random assemblages of lines. They're built from strokes, written in a specific order, and often composed of smaller components that themselves carry meaning.
Consider the character 河, which means "river" and is pronounced "hé" in Mandarin. On its left side, you'll see three short strokes that look like drops of water: 氵. This is a compressed form of the character for water (水), and it appears in hundreds of water-related characters: lake (湖), stream (流), slippery (滑), and many more. This component tells you the character has something to do with water.
The right side of 河 is 可, pronounced "kě." This is the phonetic component—it hints at how the character sounds. Notice that 河 (hé) and 可 (kě) rhyme but aren't identical. Phonetic components often provide approximate rather than exact pronunciation guides, and thousands of years of sound changes have made some phonetic hints almost useless in modern Chinese.
This combination of semantic and phonetic components is called a phono-semantic compound, and it's the most common character structure. About fifty-eight percent of frequently used characters work this way. The semantic component tells you what category of meaning to expect; the phonetic component gives you a hint about pronunciation. Together, they narrow down the possibilities enormously.
The Original Characters
The earliest confirmed Chinese characters come from oracle bone inscriptions, carved into turtle shells and animal bones roughly thirty-two hundred years ago in what is now Henan Province. These weren't grocery lists or love letters—they were divination records. The Shang dynasty's royal house used them to communicate with ancestors and predict the future, heating the bones until they cracked and interpreting the patterns.
These early characters were far more pictographic than their modern descendants. The character for "sun" looked like a circle with a dot in the center. The character for "horse" actually resembled a horse. Over centuries, as writing spread and people wrote faster, these pictographs streamlined into abstract shapes optimized for brushwork rather than visual representation.
By the Han dynasty, roughly two thousand years ago, characters had largely lost their pictorial quality. This wasn't a loss of information—it was a gain in efficiency. You don't need a character that looks like a horse to know it means "horse" any more than you need the letter A to look like an ox head (which it originally did, rotated—the horns became the two legs of the letter).
Traditional and Simplified: A Modern Divide
If you've ever compared Chinese text from Taiwan with text from mainland China, you've noticed they look different. Taiwan uses traditional characters, which preserve forms that have been standardized for centuries. Mainland China uses simplified characters, introduced in the 1950s and 1960s as part of literacy campaigns.
The simplification was pragmatic. Many traditional characters have twenty, thirty, or more strokes. The character for "dragon" in traditional form (龍) has sixteen strokes; the simplified version (龙) has five. The reformers argued that simpler characters would be easier to learn and faster to write, helping to boost literacy rates in a country where most people couldn't read.
The division persists. Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia use simplified characters. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use traditional characters. This isn't just a question of handwriting—it affects typography, signage, education, and digital communication. Most literate Chinese people can read both forms, though they typically write only in the style they learned in school.
Beyond China: Characters Across Asia
Chinese characters spread throughout East Asia along with Chinese culture, Buddhism, and diplomatic influence. Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all adopted characters to write their own languages—though each culture adapted them differently.
In Japanese, Chinese characters are called kanji (literally "Han characters," referring to the Han dynasty). Japanese is structurally very different from Chinese—it has conjugations, particles, and word endings that Chinese lacks—so Japanese developed two additional syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana, to work alongside kanji. Modern Japanese writing mixes all three: kanji for content words, hiragana for grammatical elements, and katakana for foreign loanwords and emphasis.
Korean called them hanja, and they dominated Korean writing for centuries. But in the fifteenth century, King Sejong commissioned the creation of Hangul, an alphabetic script designed specifically for the Korean language. Today, Hanja appears mainly in specialized contexts—legal documents, academic writing, and newspaper headlines where space is limited and the meaning needs to be precise.
Vietnamese used Chinese characters (chữ Hán) and also developed their own character-based script (chữ Nôm) for native Vietnamese words. But French colonization brought the Latin alphabet, and modern Vietnamese is written entirely in romanized form with diacritical marks to indicate tones. Chinese characters are now historical artifacts in Vietnam, though many Vietnamese words still reveal their Chinese origins if you know where to look.
The Technology Problem
Chinese characters posed a genuine crisis for modern technology. Typewriters, which revolutionized writing in alphabetic languages, were nightmarishly complex for Chinese. A typical Chinese typewriter had a tray of several thousand metal character slugs; the typist would hunt for each character, place it, and print it. Skilled operators could manage perhaps twenty characters per minute. An English typist could do sixty words per minute, each word averaging five characters.
Telegraph systems, which encode information as sequences of signals, required Chinese to be translated into numerical codes. Each character got a four-digit number, and telegraphers had to memorize or look up thousands of code pairs. Sending a telegram in Chinese meant encoding your message into numbers, transmitting the numbers, and having someone on the other end decode them back into characters.
Computers seemed like they might kill Chinese characters entirely. Early computer systems could barely handle 256 characters—the entire English alphabet, numbers, punctuation, and some control codes. How could you fit a writing system with thousands of characters into that space?
The solution came through clever engineering. Modern input methods let users type romanized pronunciations (pinyin in Mandarin, for example) and select from a menu of characters that match those sounds. The Unicode Standard eventually expanded to accommodate Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and essentially every writing system on Earth. Today, typing Chinese on a smartphone is arguably faster than typing English, because each character packs more meaning per keystroke.
The Building Blocks: Six Traditional Categories
Chinese scholars have analyzed character formation for nearly two thousand years. The most influential framework comes from a dictionary called the Shuowen Jiezi, compiled around 100 CE. It proposed six categories for how characters work, though modern scholars have refined and sometimes challenged these classifications.
Pictographs are the most ancient type: simple pictures of objects. Sun (日) was a circle with a center mark. Moon (月) resembled a crescent. Tree (木) looked like a tree with branches and roots. Most pictographs have become so stylized that their pictorial origins are invisible to modern readers. You wouldn't guess that 馬 (horse) was once a recognizable horse drawing unless someone told you.
Indicatives represent abstract concepts that can't be drawn. Up (上) and down (下) were originally dots placed above and below a horizontal line. Convex (凸) and concave (凹) show their meanings through their very shapes—you can see the bump and the dip.
Compound ideographs combine meaningful elements to suggest a new meaning. The character for bright (明) pairs sun (日) with moon (月)—the two brightest objects in the sky. Rest (休) shows a person (人) leaning against a tree (木). These characters tell little stories in their construction.
However, many traditional examples of compound ideographs turn out, on closer analysis, to be phono-semantic compounds in disguise. Sound changes over millennia have obscured the original phonetic hints, leaving only the semantic components visible. Scholars still debate which characters are "true" compound ideographs versus misidentified phonetic compounds.
Phono-semantic compounds—already described above—combine meaning and sound hints. They're the workhorses of the Chinese writing system, accounting for the majority of characters.
Loangraphs are characters borrowed to write words with similar sounds. This is the rebus principle in action. Many grammatical particles—the little function words that structure sentences—are written with loangraphs because abstract concepts like "of" or "that which" can't be drawn. The character 之, now a grammatical particle, was borrowed for its sound; its original meaning is largely irrelevant to its modern use.
Loangraphs also appear when Chinese borrows foreign words. Canada is written 加拿大 (Jiānádà), using characters chosen for their approximate sounds. But the choice of characters isn't random—each has positive or neutral connotations. Coca-Cola's Chinese name, 可口可乐 (Kěkǒu Kělè), uses characters meaning "delicious" and "enjoyable." That's not an accident; it's careful marketing through character selection.
Pure signs are characters with no obvious pictorial or phonetic logic—their meaning exists purely by convention. The numerals above four (五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十 for five through ten) don't visually represent their quantities. You simply have to learn that 八 means eight.
Why This Matters for Language Learners
If you're studying Chinese—and the Substack article that prompted this essay suggests there are good reasons to do so even in an age of AI translation—understanding how characters work gives you learning superpowers.
When you encounter a new character, you can analyze it. Does it have a water radical? It probably relates to liquids. Does it contain a phonetic component you recognize? You have a guess at the pronunciation. Does it combine two elements whose meanings you know? The combined meaning might be logical.
This isn't always reliable. Sound changes have scrambled many phonetic hints. Meanings have drifted. Some characters are simply arbitrary. But the patterns exist, and knowing them transforms rote memorization into detective work.
AI translation tools can convert Chinese to English instantaneously. But they can't give you the experience of recognizing a character you learned last month appearing unexpectedly in a new context. They can't replicate the satisfaction of reading a sign on a street in Beijing and knowing what it says before the translation app loads. They can't help you understand the subtle connotations that make one character choice more elegant than another.
Chinese characters are one of humanity's most successful technologies—a system for encoding thought that has survived dynasty changes, invasions, revolutions, and the digital age. Learning them connects you to thirty centuries of recorded thought, from Shang dynasty oracle bones to this morning's Weibo posts. No algorithm can give you that.
The Persistence of Characters
Throughout the twentieth century, reformers periodically proposed abolishing Chinese characters entirely. Some argued that China could never modernize with such a complex writing system. Mao Zedong reportedly said that Chinese would eventually need to adopt an alphabet. Vietnam and Korea had already shown it was possible.
It never happened. Characters survived because they work. They allow written communication across dialect boundaries—a Cantonese speaker and a Mandarin speaker might not understand each other's speech, but they can read the same text. They pack enormous meaning into minimal space, crucial for everything from signage to poetry. They carry cultural prestige accumulated over millennia.
And perhaps most importantly, billions of people already know them. Switching an entire civilization's writing system is not like updating an app. It requires retraining every literate person, reprinting every book, redesigning every sign. The inertia is enormous, and the benefits of switching are unclear when the existing system, for all its complexity, clearly functions.
So Chinese characters persist: ancient technology, endlessly adapted, still evolving. Every time someone types a text message in Shanghai or Taipei, they're using a system that began with diviners scratching questions to ancestors on turtle shells. That unbroken line of transmission—meaning flowing through symbol through meaning again—is itself a kind of miracle.