For people from other countries, learning Chinese characters seems to be the hardest part. I think the main reason for that is that Chinese characters look very different from their quarter parts in Roman languages. Each Chinese character shows not only how to say the word, but also what it means. People often complain that Chinese characters are so different from each other that you have to learn them one by one, and there are so many of them to remember. Also, when you come across a new character, what you know about other characters doesn't help much, so you can't either say it directly or guess what it means. In fact, there are some links between Chinese characters, which are all made in a certain way. You can't figure it out because you probably don't know enough Chinese characters or you didn't learn them from a Chinese point of view.
Chinese characters are the way that the Chinese language is written down. It has been around for at least 8,000 years, making it possibly the oldest writing system still in use. An old Chinese story said that Cangjie, a historian who worked for the legendary emperor Huangdi in 2600 BC, made up the Chinese characters. Obviously, the story can't be true, because making a great writing system with so many characters is too big of a job for just one person to do. But maybe Cangjie did make some contributions to the existing Chinese writing system. Instead of being the creator, he might have been a person in ancient China who found and put together scattered Chinese characters. People like Cangjie and regular people who used and spread characters made it possible for a full, well-developed writing system to be born. Chinese characters written on turtle shells from the Shang dynasty (1766–1123 BC) are undeniable proof. This writing system is called Oracle bone script. About 1,000 of the 4,600 known Oracle bone logographs can be matched to later Chinese characters. The rest are mostly names of people, places, or clans that cannot be matched.
From the point of view of how it was made, written Chinese is made up of ideograms. During the Eastern Han Dynasty (121 AD), Xu Shen was a well-known scholar. His etymological dictionary, Shuo Wen Jie Zi, which literally means "explaining written language and parsing words," made him famous. In Shuo wen, Chinese characters are put into six groups: pictogram, ideograph, logical aggregates, pictophonetic compounds, borrowing, and associate transformation. But the last twos are often left out because the characters that make up these categories have been used before, either as part of another word or as separate words. Most Chinese characters can be put into one of four groups based on where they came from.
Graphics (Xiang4 xing2 zi4)
Pictograms were the first characters ever made, and they usually look like the objects they represent. The sun, the moon, a woman, and fire are all good examples. From this method of drawing pictures, the other rules for making characters were made. Over a long period of time, pictograms have changed from scribbles to clear shapes. To make them easier to write, some strokes have been taken away. So, to see what it really means, you need to have a lot of imagination and know where the character came from and how it has changed over time. But this is true for less than 5 percent of Chinese characters.
Ideogram (Zhi3 shi4 zi4)
Ideographs are often used to explain abstract ideas. They are also called "simple indicatives." It's a mix of signs or an addition of a sign to a pictograph. A short horizontal bar on top of a circle, for example, means "up" or "on top of." In another example, an ideograph for "root" is made by adding a horizontal bar to the bottom of a pictogram for wood. Like pictograms, this category has a small number of items: less than 2%.
Logical aggregates (Hui4 yi4 zi1)
It's a group of pictures that show what they mean, kind of like telling a story. The word "rest" can be written with a picture of a person on the left and a picture of wood on the right. This story-telling formation is easier to learn than most, but most of the groups have been changed into phonetic compounds or have been replaced by them.
Compounds of pictures and words (Xing2 sheng1 zi4)
Also called "semantic-phonetic compounds," it combines a semantic element with a phonetic element, taking the meaning from one and the sounds from the other. For example, the character for "ocean," which is pronounced "yang2," is made up of a semantic classifier that means "water" and a phonetic component that means "goat" or "sheep" by itself. This last group of characters makes up about 90% of all Chinese characters and is the largest in modern Chinese.
Phonetic-compounds are better than the first three categories because they have their own phonetic parts. Many objects and ideas are hard to show with pictures or ideograms, and the fact that the phonetic parts are linked to how the character is pronounced helps the Chinese language grow much faster than logical aggregates. Because of this, most new characters are made in this more scientific way.
But over the centuries, the Chinese language has changed so much that most pictophonetic compounds no longer sound like their phonetic parts, and the semantic parts don't seem to have anything to do with what they mean now. You can only understand how a character was made if you know where it came from and how it changed over time. For example, the character for shell is the semantic part of the phonetic compound for cargo or goods. This is because shells were used as a way to trade goods in ancient China, just like money.
I hope that the above information will help you learn Chinese characters. Please let me know what you think about it so I can help you write better in the future. Thank you!
