Chinese Characters 101

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Luke Neale
Luke has maintained a love for Chinese
culture since the age of 13 when he became
interested in martial arts. He came to China
for the first time in 2007 with very basic
Chinese skills and was amazed by the
warmth and depth of Chinese people.
Luke's strength is his native-like
pronunciation; having placed a strong focus
on it early on.
Phil Crimmins
In Spring 2017, Phil graduated from Sichuan
University with a bachelor’s degree in the
Chinese language, and he was also awarded an
“Outstanding Thesis Award” for his dissertation
titled “Chinese Acquisition Methods from the
Perspective of a Mandarin Learner.”
Phil's strength in Mandarin is reading and
writing; having started his study with a heavy
focus on Chinese characters.

COMPLEMENTARY CURRICULUM COLLABORATORS
We met back in 2013 and quickly discovered that we were both equally passionate
about learning Chinese. As well as becoming great friends, we started sharing the
various memory techniques and learning tools we found helpful for language
acquisition. As a result, we found ourselves improving many times faster than
others in our peer group, all while investing less time and seemingly having a lot
more fun along the way.
After both passing the HSK 6 in a quarter of the allotted time, we knew we were
onto something big. We decided to join forces and create a crash course on how to
learn Chinese, sharing our knowledge with the local community of Chengdu. It
became so popular that we began teaching online and creating awesome video
courses. We now have a total of 16 years of experience both learning and teaching
Chinese, and in that time we have become acutely aware of the problems Chinese
learners continue to face, and how to solve them.
In late 2018, we were both given inventor status for the US patent application
titled "Method of Teaching Chinese Characters, Vocabulary, and Grammar as a
Second Language to Non-native Speakers" (pat # PCT/US18/57921). This became
the basis for our ground-breaking video curriculum that we call “The Mandarin
Blueprint Method”.
Learning Chinese changed our lives forever. We discovered that those who embark
upon this learning journey are rewarded with knowledge & wisdom that comes not
just from the language itself, but more importantly from the hearts and minds of
Chinese people. It is as enlightening an experience as we could have ever hoped
for, and now it is your turn.
Let’s get to it!

Chinese Characters 101
www.mandarinblueprint.com
CONTENTS
Everything you Need to Know To Get Started
WHAT ARE CHARACTERS?

- Single Syllable Mini-Meanings (SSM)
- Double Syllable Mini-Meanings (DSM)
- Multiple Syllable Mini-Meanings (MSM)
- Compound Words（合成词）
WHY LEARNING CHARACTERS IS 100% ESSENTIAL
HOW MANY CHARACTERS YOU NEED?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHARACTERS
STROKES & STROKE ORDER

- Introduction to Strokes
- Stroke Order Rules
COMPONENTS
- The Semantic Component Makes Chinese Awesome
- A Closer Look at the Phonetic Component
- A Note on “Radicals”
THE 6 TYPES OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

- Pictographs 象形字 xiàngxíngzì
- Simple Ideographs 指事字 zhǐshìzì
- Compound ideographs 会意字 huìyìzì
- Phonetic-Semantic Compounds 形声字 xíngshēngzì
- Transfer Characters 转注字 zhuǎnzhùzì
- Loan Characters 假借字 jiǎjièzì
HOW TO LEARN ANY CHINESE CHARACTER IN LESS THAN 1 MINUTE (PLUS A

FREE GIFT!)
Mandarin Blueprint ® !2 2019 All Rights Reserved

WHAT ARE CHARACTERS?
Chinese characters are “morphemes”, the smallest meaningful unit of a language.
We like to call these “mini-meanings”. Here’s an English Example:
We can split “unexpected” into “un-expect-ed”. These three separate parts
are morphemes, and we hope this helps illustrate that a morpheme isn’t
necessarily a word. You can’t use either “un-” or “-ed” by themselves, but they both
have their own meanings, and influence the definition of a word.
Chinese characters function in the same way. Some of them are words, some of
them are not, but with rare exception, they are all morphemes.

There are three types of these “mini-meanings.” Let’s go through them one-by-one.
Single Syllable Mini-Meanings (SSM)
Single syllable morphemes are by far the most common type of mini-meaning in
Chinese. SSMs are one character and are meaningful in isolation. A SSM does not
require another character to express its meaning.
Examples: ⼈人 rén，⼝口 kǒu，⼭山 shān，⼤大 dà，了了 le，吗 ma
SSM can also be separated into two types: Word SSM & Non-Word SSM (see image
on previous page).
Word SSMs are characters that are also words like ⼈人，⾛走，and ⼤大. Non-word SSMs
are characters that can’t stand alone as words, but they can be and are used as part
of a huge number of multiple character words.
Double Syllable Mini-Meanings (DSM)

These morphemes have two sources, Ancient Chinese & Borrowed Foreign Words.
These morphemes are two characters, so each character does not have meaning by
itself. It only has meaning when combined with other characters.
Examples:
徘徊－páihuái From Ancient Chinese means to pace back and forth or hesitate. 徘
or 徊 by themselves do not contain meaning, only when combined.
伶俐－línglì From Ancient Chinese means clever or quick-witted.
沙发－shāfā From English means “Sofa” (imitates the English pronunciation). Even
though 沙 and 发 by themselves have a meaning, they only hold the meaning of
Sofa when put together in this way, and thus are one double syllable morpheme.
苏打－sūdá From English means “Soda.”
Multiple Syllable Mini-Meanings (MSM)

These mini-meanings of three or more syllables almost all come from other
languages and thus by only have meaning when combined.
Examples:
巧克⼒力力－qiǎokèlì From English means Chocolate
迪斯尼－dìsīní From English means Disney
奥林林匹克－ aòlínpǐkè From English, mean Olympics
Compound Words（合成词）
A compound word is a combination of two or more “mini-meanings” to create a
new meaning. Put simply, words with two or more characters that all have
independent meaning. This is by far the most common type of Chinese word.
If each character has their own individual meaning, then the more important
question becomes the following:
What is the relationship between these mini-meanings?
The vast majority of compound words are two characters, and there are seven
major ways those two-characters can relate to each other. What seven ways you
ask? You can check out our blog post series on all 7 types here.

WHY LEARNING CHARACTERS IS

100% ESSENTIAL
“Yeah, I’m studying Chinese…I mean, obviously I’m not going to bother with the
characters, who needs that?”
We’ve heard the above statement loads of times, even said it ourselves (rather
adamantly) when we were first starting out. Oh how naïve we were! The main (and
rather obvious) reason that the above statement is actually quite absurd is because
Mandarin consists of around 400 pronunciations (not accounting for tones). 400
different-sounding words only. That’s…nothing. At least not compared to English
(just think for a second about how many different sounding words English has!).

Ben Whatley (the creator of www.memrise.com) put it best on one of his blog
posts:
“420 syllables of pinyin represent the pronunciation of all of the
characters in the entire language. Of the characters in everyday
usage this means that there are an average of around 11
characters for each pinyin syllable.”
In other words, as your vocabulary gets higher things are going to start to get really
confusing.
What about if you know characters? No confusion. None. You know that you are
saying (and reading) “thing” (是 -shì) and not “market” (市 – also shì), because you
understand that they are totally different characters, with unrelated components. 
But all of this really doesn’t matter regarding learning characters, for two main
reasons: 
The first reason is that Chinese characters are by far the most beautiful part of the
language. The allegory, metaphor and depth of these characters is interwoven with
history and culture. English pales in comparison in this respect.

The second reason is that no characters means no reading, and reading is an
incredibly effective way (perhaps the most effective way) to acquire a second
language. This is supported by a ton of linguistic research over recent decades. This
suggests that if you don’t learn characters, you are cutting yourself off from one of
the best ways to suck less at Chinese.
HOW MANY CHARACTERS DO YOU NEED?
Everybody often quite reasonably asks, to be fluent in Chinese, how many
characters do I have to learn? Its a good question, and the answers can sometimes
be intimidating, but its important to recognize that Chinese, like any other

language, has characters and words that are used more frequently than others, and
this is where you should start.
Consider this, the top 250 most commonly used characters make up a whopping
64% of everyday language. Now that’s a number I can live with! 250 is nothing to
spit at, but it doesn’t sounds as impossible as say, 5,000. We’ve had students in the
past get a bit confused by the idea that such a small number of characters can
occupy such a high percentage of the overall language, so here is a way you could
conceptualize it: Imagine you are reading a 1000 character article online. Assuming
it not an article that uses loads of specialized jargon from a particular discipline,
then about 644 of the 1000 characters in the article are going to be comprised of
the most frequent 250 characters in Chinese. (This phenomenon occurs all over the
place, it is called the Pareto Principle).
Move to the most common 500 characters, and you’ve gotten yourself to nearly
80% of your everyday language. This suggests that if you learn these 500
characters, you will be able to recognize, and therefore reinforce your knowledge
of them with quite a bit of consistency day to day.
As you continue to increase in character count, there naturally starts to be a law of
diminishing returns, 1000 (91%), 1500 (95.7%), 2000 (97.9%) and 3,000 (99.4%).
Here’s the thing though, if you get yourself to say, 500 characters, you are going to
start to feel that the progress is taking effect, that you have the ability to go all the
way if you just keep showing up, being curious, and reminding yourself of how
much it will benefit you to stick with it. That feeling is amazing, like lightning in a
bottle.

Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 characters, you will be at a level where you
don’t necessarily need to keep learning characters individually, but instead be able
to learn new characters purely through the context of your reading, because at
that point you will have such a solid grasp of how characters are structured know
how they commonly express meaning and pronunciation.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHARACTERS
Chinese Characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in existence,
and they have been adapted for use in several other Asian languages over the
years. Here is a brief timeline of the development of these characters:
Earliest Chinese characters…
According to historical data, the first Chinese characters can be traced back as far as
six thousand years ago to an archeological site east of Xi’an, China.
甲⻣骨字 Jiǎgǔ zì “Oracle Bone Script” (2000-1000BC)
These date back to more than three thousand years ago, where they can be found
carved into tortoise shell or animal bones (also known as ‘oracle-bones’). This was

done by some to make predictions about the future. Several of these ancient
characters are still used today and even still look almost exactly the same!
⾦金金字 Jīnzì “Bronze Script” (2000-300BC)
During the Bronze Age, characters began to be carved or casted onto
bronze. They are very similar to the oracle bone script above, except
thicker and more structured due to the use of molds.
篆书 Zhuànshū “Seal Script” (500BC-200BC)
This eventually became the more standardized script used
throughout the entire country under emperor Qin. The characters
were more elongated during this time.
Unlike the previous two character types, they had less variants and became the the
basis of modern day characters.
⾪隶书 Lìshū “Clerical Script” (200BC-150AD)
Said to be invented by a man during his 10-year prison sentence as
punishment for “offending” Emperor Qin Shihuang. Upon seeing this

new form of writing, emperor Qin was so impressed that he rescinded the prison
sentence!
This style of writing (often illegible) was invented with the ease of
handwritten communication in mind. A key characteristic of this style
of writing was the introduction of characters that didn’t directly
represent material objects.
楷书 Kǎishū “Regular Script”, ⾏行行书 xíngshū “Semi-Cursive/Running

Script”, and 草书 cǎoshū “Cursive Script” (151AD-Today)
As the use of writing brushes became more widespread, clerical script
evolved into Kaishu or “Regular Script”. This was due to clerical script
being too complicated and difficult to read.
Soon afterwards, semi-semi-cursive and cursive scripts were
developed to make writing Chinese even easier and faster. These two
styles are still in use and fully legible to the average educated Chinese person.
STROKES & STROKE ORDER
Introduction to Strokes

In total there are 35 different possible Chinese strokes. There are six basic Chinese
strokes and 29 compound strokes. Compound Chinese strokes are combinations of
basic strokes & combining strokes.
Don’t worry about practicing these individually. Because in our patent-pending
video curriculum The Mandarin Blueprint Method, we start teaching you from the
essential components and gradually build up from there.
Stroke Order Rules
Handwriting characters is essential as a means of developing muscle memory to
further enhance your retention of Chinese character. It’s also very useful to be able
to write Chinese by hand in certain situations. Just to be 100% clear, though, we do

NOT advocate rote learning! We just recommend writing them out once or twice
while learning or reviewing them for the reasons stated above.
In order to write characters in a remotely legible way, you need to follow a clear set
of rules. Rather than list them one by one here, you can check out our youtube
playlist here
COMPONENTS
There are thousands of characters, but not nearly as many components. They can
have two functions:
• Semantic: Showing meaning
• Phonetic: Showing sound
油 or “Oil” to the left has 氵which shows that this character has something to do
with liquid. 油 on the right side is “由” which gives a clue to the pronunciation of
“yóu.”
The pronunciation is not always the same as the phonetic element within it.
Sometimes it is slightly different (e.g., ⽺羊 yáng and 样 yàng), sometimes it is very

different (每 měi 海海 hǎi), but there is usually some pronunciation connection. We

will show this more once we get to the types of Chinese characters.
The Semantic Component Makes Chinese Awesome
The fact that an individual 汉字 can give you a visual representation of the meaning
allows for quicker contextual acquisition. If you see a character you’ve never
learned before, but you know the semantic component, then you’ve already taken
a significant step towards learning that character right from the jump.
In English, the majority of words don’t give you any semantic clue. Some do (like
“playground”), but most don’t. If you don’t know a word and aren’t a linguistics
scholar, you need extra help to acquire it. You don’t even know where to put the
syllable stress. Chinese is superior in this aspect.
A Closer Look at the Phonetic Component
The below examples are easy to understand. One of the components represents
the pronunciation, so look for the shared component to get an idea:
⼒力力历沥苈励呖疬
All pronounced lì
玲零龄铃伶呤

All pronounced líng
⽅方房放防仿访坊
All pronounced as some tone of “fang”.
⾉艮垦恳裉跟根很恨狠痕银眼限艰
All end in either “en” or “an”
良娘酿狼浪粮稂阆莨琅螂锒踉
All end in either “-ang” or “-iang”.
NOTE: The phonetic component in a Chinese character is not necessarily a precise map
to the pronunciation. Think of it more like a “clue”. The first two examples with lì & líng
show you examples of precise mapping, but the final three examples show how the
component is more like a clue to the pronunciation “family” you are reading.
Not learning components would be similar to studying mathematical answers
without studying the core equations. As a result, when creating The Mandarin
Blueprint Method, we based the order sequence for learning 汉字 on the

components.
A Note on “Radicals”
214 exist, many are uncommon. “Radicals” are the representations of paper
dictionary categories. If you want to look something up in a paper dictionary, you
need some system for finding what you are looking for, and so radicals were

invented to help with this. There is only one radical assigned to every 汉字, and they
aren’t necessarily semantic components. To a large degree, “radical” assignment is
random.
Unless you are planning to use paper dictionaries, we recommend you scrap this
word from your vocabulary. Instead, refer to the elements of Chinese characters as
“components”.
THE 6 TYPES OF CHINESE CHARACTER
Pictographs 象形字 xiàngxíngzì
Pictographs make up only a small portion of Chinese characters (Less than 5%).
They are the most ancient and the easiest to learn. The appearance itself expresses
the meaning, and most pictographs are simple nouns.

The majority of Chinese learning resources cite these characters as a way of
showing you just how easy Chinese characters are to learn. Please don’t fall for this
trick! Remember, 95%+ of characters are not pictographs.
Simple Ideographs 指事字 zhǐshìzì
Ideographs show the meaning of abstract concepts that are harder to express
concretely like a pictograph. They make up an even smaller amount of characters
than pictographs.
Compound ideographs 会意字 huìyìzì
This type of ideograph takes two or more pictographs OR simple ideographs and
makes a 3rd definition, often making the characters not only fascinating but also
easy to learn.

From left to right we have the characters for “Home,” “Point/Tip” and “To Rest.”
“Home” is made up of two pictographs meaning “roof” and “pig,” “Point/Tip” is
made up of 2 simple ideographs “Small” (top) and “Big” (bottom), and “Rest” is two
pictographs of “Person” and “Tree.”
Compound ideographs make up at least 10% of characters.
Phonetic-Semantic Compounds 形声字 xíngshēngzì

Phonetic-Semantic Compounds follow a standard principle: One component
represents the meaning, another represents the pronunciation.
Let’s look at the following three characters that Chinese uses as components in
countless other 汉字：
⼝口 - Opening/Mouth (kǒu)
⽔水 (氵) - Water (shuǐ)
⾍虫 - Insect (chóng)
These three all have meaning when used alone, but can also be components
squeezed to the side in more complex 汉字. When becoming components, the
shape usually changes slightly or entirely (e.g., ⽔水 is 氵when as a left-side

component).
Examples with ⼝口:
叫吃响喝喝嘴唱味喊吸吹
All of these characters are related to a “mouth”. Call, Eat, Sound, Drink, Mouth,
Sing, Flavour, Shout, Inhale, Blow.
The above 汉字 all fit the “Semantic on the left, phonetic on the right”
construction.
Examples with ⽔水 & 氵:
氵流清酒油波洗瀑浆湖源
All of these characters are related to “water” or “liquid.”

Flow, Pure, Alcoholic Beverage, Oil, Wash, Waterfall, Thick Liquid, Lake, Source (of a
river)
NOTE: 浆 is a character where the meaning is on the bottom. All other characters the
meaning of “water/liquid” is conveyed on the left.
Examples with ⾍虫:
蛇蜜蝴蝶茧蚁蚊蜘蛛蚕
All of these characters are related to “insects” or “insect-like animals.”
Snake, Bee, 蝴蝶－Butterfly, Cocoon, Ant, Mosquito, 蜘蛛- Spider, Silkworm
NOTE: 茧 Cocoon and 蚕 Silkworm are characters where the meaning is on the bottom.
All of the other 汉字 have the semantic component on the left.
Transfer Characters 转注字 zhuǎnzhùzì
There are a minuscule number of these characters. This definition
from Douban does a great job of explaining it:
Characters in this category initially didn’t represent the same
meaning but have bifurcated through orthographic and often
semantic drift. For instance, 考 (kǎo) to verify and ⽼老老 (lǎo) old were
once the same character, meaning “elderly person,” but detached
into two separate words. Characters of this category are rare, so in
modern systems, this group is often omitted or combined with
others.

Loan Characters 假借字 jiǎjièzì
These are characters that were “loaned” from other characters with the same
sound. For example, there was no character for 来 (lái)“to come,” so it was given its
character from that of 莱 (lái), meaning cereal.
LEARN HOW TO READ, WRITE AND PRONOUNCE

ANY CHINESE CHARACTER IN LESS THAN ONE
MINUTE
Okay, so you now know what characters are, how they work, and how super
important they are to developing skills rapidly. What we haven’t talked about yet is
how to learn them.
We have pieced together the most incredible system for character learning based
on the proven techniques of memory champions. We call this system “The Hanzi
Movie Method”, and it is just a single part of our much larger curriculum “The
Mandarin Blueprint Method”.
Click below to learn more about this radically different learning system and start
learning how to read, listen, speak and write Chinese now.
LEARN MORE

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Luke has maintained a love for Chinese

culture since the age of 13 when he became

interested in martial arts. He came to China

for the ﬁrst time in 2007 with very basic

Chinese skills and was amazed by the

warmth and depth of Chinese people.

Luke's strength is his native-like

pronunciation; having placed a strong focus

In Spring 2017, Phil graduated from Sichuan

University with a bachelor’s degree in the

Chinese language, and he was also awarded an

“Outstanding Thesis Award” for his dissertation

titled “Chinese Acquisition Methods from the

Perspective of a Mandarin Learner.”

Phil's strength in Mandarin is reading and

writing; having started his study with a heavy

focus on Chinese characters.

acquisition. As a result, we found ourselves improving many times faster than

more fun along the way.

learners continue to face, and how to solve them.

titled "Method of Teaching Chinese Characters, Vocabulary, and Grammar as a

Second Language to Non-native Speakers" (pat # PCT/US18/57921). This became

Chinese people. It is as enlightening an experience as we could have ever hoped

for, and now it is your turn.

Let’s get to it!

WHAT ARE CHARACTERS?

WHY LEARNING CHARACTERS IS 100% ESSENTIAL

HOW MANY CHARACTERS YOU NEED?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHARACTERS

STROKES & STROKE ORDER

THE 6 TYPES OF CHINESE CHARACTERS

HOW TO LEARN ANY CHINESE CHARACTER IN LESS THAN 1 MINUTE (PLUS A

Mandarin Blueprint ® !2 2019 All Rights Reserved

WHAT ARE CHARACTERS?

Chinese characters are “morphemes”, the smallest meaningful unit of a language.

We like to call these “mini-meanings”. Here’s an English Example:

We can split “unexpected” into “un-expect-ed”. These three separate parts

are morphemes, and we hope this helps illustrate that a morpheme isn’t

have their own meanings, and inﬂuence the deﬁnition of a word.

Mandarin Blueprint ® !3 2019 All Rights Reserved

Single Syllable Mini-Meanings (SSM)

require another character to express its meaning.

Examples: ⼈人 rén，⼝口 kǒu，⼭山 shān，⼤大 dà，了了 le，吗 ma

of a huge number of multiple character words.

Double Syllable Mini-Meanings (DSM)

Mandarin Blueprint ® !4 2019 All Rights Reserved

itself. It only has meaning when combined with other characters.

or 徊 by themselves do not contain meaning, only when combined.

伶俐－línglì From Ancient Chinese means clever or quick-witted.

苏打－sūdá From English means “Soda.”

Multiple Syllable Mini-Meanings (MSM)

Mandarin Blueprint ® !5 2019 All Rights Reserved

languages and thus by only have meaning when combined.

巧克⼒力力－qiǎokèlì From English means Chocolate

迪斯尼－dìsīní From English means Disney

奥林林匹克－ aòlínpǐkè From English, mean Olympics

A compound word is a combination of two or more “mini-meanings” to create a

question becomes the following:

What is the relationship between these mini-meanings?

Mandarin Blueprint ® !6 2019 All Rights Reserved

WHY LEARNING CHARACTERS IS

characters, who needs that?”