The Hidden Logic Behind Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are notoriously intimidating, at first glance resembling a jumble of messy squiggles to the uninitiated eye. For a while, I believed the conventional wisdom that Chinese characters must be memorized one by one, and that an exceptionally strong memory was a prerequisite to Chinese literacy. But it turns out that the Chinese writing system is in fact quite logical and systematic, and most characters are composed of a handful of simpler components that help the reader to decipher either the meaning, the sound, or both of the character.

Chinese characters are made up of two parts: the “meaning part,” which gives you an idea of what the character is about, and the “sound part,” which gives you an idea of how the character is pronounced. This means that often when you see a new character, you will be able to guess its meaning and pronunciation. That makes the learning process less a matter of memorization than a question of being able to decipher what you see.

Chinese characters also evolved over time, and many of the simplifications resulted from streamlining pictorial representations to facilitate writing with a brush. As a result, many characters still contain hints of the original pictorial representation from which they evolved. I have found that this knowledge adds to the excitement of learning Chinese characters, as they no longer seem like abstract squiggles but rather artifacts imbued with history.

Chinese characters must be learned in a writing system; one of the best ways to learn to recognize characters is to practice writing them yourself. This will force you to pay attention to stroke order and the spatial arrangement of component parts. Writing characters is slow going at first, but it’s a laboriousness that I have grown to appreciate. It forces me to slow down and pay attention, rather than just passively recognize characters through rote memorization. And writing the characters by hand will commit them to memory far better than simply typing them into your computer.

As you begin to learn more Chinese characters, you will start to recognize common radicals, and realize that many of them combine in predictable ways. At this point, the process of learning Chinese starts to take on its own momentum. Chinese characters will still seem new and unfamiliar at times, but they will no longer seem impossibly mysterious and incomprehensible. And every time you encounter a new character, you will have the satisfaction of noting the ways in which it is simultaneously old and familiar.