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How Many Chinese Characters Are There?

Chinese dictionaries list words by their radicals, or their root characters. It makes it easier for you to look up several words with the same radical and teach yourself some new vocabulary. Here are some fun facts about how many Chinese characters there are:To get more news about chinese alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.

Technically, the real answer to the question "How many Chinese characters are there?" is 54,678 because the variants don't really count. But don't let that scare you! Chinese schools in China only teach between 6,000 to 8,000 words. And to socialize, you only need to know between 2,500 to 4,000 characters.

The best way to learn a foreign language is through immersion. If you study Chinese in China, you will learn faster from daily conversation and understand how to speak spontaneously while your range of vocabulary naturally increases. You will also learn historical facts, customs, and traditions about the culture that you couldn't without immersion. Such nuances are important for social interaction.

Chinese is one of the world's most interesting and beautiful languages. Most students learn Mandarin, and the best place to do so is in Chinese language schools in China. Not only is Mandarin the standard Chinese dialect, but it is also the most spoken language in the world with 1.1 billion speakers. It tops English, which has 983 million speakers.

Knowing a language that people recognize around the world will open doors for you that you never thought possible. And there are tangible benefits to knowing a foreign language: A sense of multiculturalism, greater confidence, more multitasking skills, better career opportunities, higher creativity, and sharper cognitive thinking.
One of the unique aspects of the Chinese language is that there are six types of Chinese symbols, which makes the Chinese alphabet seem even more complex than it actually is. Another aspect is that one radical (root) can be used to create several words and express a variety of meanings. That is why the Great Compendium of Chinese Characters has 54,678 characters, the Dictionary of Chinese Variant Form has 106,230 characters, and a modern dictionary has up to 20,000 characters. All Chinese characters are logograms or logographs; that is, they each represent words.

Ideograms or combined ideographs: Ideograms represent words, syllables, or morphemes (the smallest grammatical unit of a language). The Chinese language has about 1,200 syllables according to Jerry Norman of the book Chinese(2008, Cambridge University Press). Ideograms differ from ideographs in that they combine two or more pictographs or ideographs to create new meanings. They are also written differently with the pictographs or ideographs being one on top of the other.

Phonograms or phonetic compounds: Words that are actually a combination of a pictogram and phonetic character, or two logographs, to create new meanings. They contain two parts: One is the radical element showing the meaning, and the other is the phonetic component showing pronunciation.

Peking Man has given scientists important clues about the origins of human language, especially such a phonetic language as Chinese. The creation of Chinese characters was a long and gradual process which people engaged in all across ancient China. It is for this reason that the Chinese language is deeply interconnected with Chinese philosophy and medicine.

First, people created Chinese symbols from family or clan emblems to decorate everyday tools. They formed them from simple drawings of animals and nature. Their meanings were visually obvious to everyone regardless of blood relations. That is why even today, people speaking different Chinese dialects can understand each other through writing Chinese characters.

The creation of oracle bone script was next. People used this system to write the script onto turtle shells and animal bones, and then heat them until cracks appeared. They would then interpret the patterns for divination purposes, such as predicting the weather. If you’ve ever heard of the system of Feng Shui, its energy map mimics the markings of a turtle shell. The name itself literally translates to "wind water."