Mandarin Chinese Language and Culture Blog

Want to speak Chinese naturally?

by MICHAELCRUICKSHANK

How to Read Chinese: The

Newbie's No-stress Guide
“How can anyone read this? It’s impossible!”

Sound familiar?

Of all the reasons why people think learning Mandarin

Chinese is difficult, nothing comes up more commonly
than those supposedly crazy characters.

To an untrained eye, they do indeed appear

incomprehensible.

Just the sight of them can bring on frustration,

discouragement or even outright panic!

However, there’s really no reason to get all bent out of

shape.

Chinese characters are not significantly more difficult

than those in other writing systems.
But just like with all the others, you need to understand
the system to understand the characters.

So let’s just dive right in and uncover the mystery.

Take a deep breath, relax and discover how you should

be reading Chinese!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient

and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click
here to get a copy. (Download)

Don’t panic! There’s a system to the

madness

Even for beginners, it should soon become readily

apparent that Chinese characters are not just “random
drawings.” They actually follow a reasonably neat
system by which characters can be easily split up into
their component parts, making them much simpler to
understand.

Radicals

The first and most important part of Chinese characters

is what are called radicals. These are elements (usually
found on the left hand side, or underneath a character)
that suggest the meaning based on broad categories.

A simple example of this is the wood radical, based off

the Chinese character for wood, ⽊mù.
This character can then be found as a radical in a
number of wooden objects such as 桥 qiáo (a bridge) or
楼 lóu (a building). Chinese is generally accepted to
have 214 radicals, and these range from ones that
convey a literal meaning to ones that convey a more
vague feeling.

Are you with me so far? Okay, let’s move on.

Pictograms

Another important grouping within Chinese characters

is pictograms. These are characters that are meant to
look like the object or thing they represent. While the
obvious similarities have been lost over thousands of
years, with a little imagination and understanding of
Chinese culture, you can start to recognize meanings.
Some examples of these include ⼈ rén (person), ⾼
gāo (tall, represented as a tall pagoda) and ⼭
shān (mountain).

Ideograms

Similar to pictograms, ideograms are another old and

somewhat confusing element of Chinese reading.
These are characters that were pictographic
representations of themes, rather than things, which
have since been highly stylized.

A good example of these is the character 互

hù, meaning “mutual,” which is a representation of two
people holding hands. Such characters aren’t generally
understandable on first viewing, but much easier to
remember once the backstory is learnt.

Pictophonetics

Okay, now the most common (and indeed most

important!) group of characters for any Chinese reader
are so-called pictophonetic characters.

These characters are made up of a radical element,

which suggests what category of things (or actions) it
belongs to, as well as a distinct phonetic component,
which suggests how it should be pronounced.
Now pay close attention, because learning these
phonetic elements is the key to learning to read
Chinese.

How to use Chinese phonetics to read

like a pro
Beware of commonly used association methods—
they can stab you in the foot!

When many people start learning Mandarin Chinese,

they are introduced to pictographic and ideographic
characters, and think that associating a character with a
picture (and a meaning) is a good idea. Seems like an
okay strategy, right? But watch out!

While this can be effective for the first 100-200

characters you might learn, such a strategy will
inevitably fail. This is due to the fact that such
characters make up only around 10% of the total
Chinese characters, meaning that your picture-
associations will have to get progressively more
outlandish and creative as your studies advance. Talk
about crazy!

The basic theory of Chinese character phonetics

Luckily, there is a better way to read Chinese. Most of

the Chinese language is written in pictophonetic
characters, meaning that you simply need to learn all of
the phonetic elements to be able to read significant
portions of Chinese texts.

“Okay,” you’re thinking, “But what are these phonetic

elements?”

Well, often these are difficult to tell apart from radicals,

and unfortunately they are rarely taught officially by
Chinese teachers who prefer rote learning of
pronunciation and meaning. But once you start using at
least a few hundred characters, patterns of
pronunciation will emerge.

For example, almost all characters with 巴 bā in them—

such as 吧 把 爸
ba (final particle), bă (“to hold”),
疤
bà (“father,” “dad”) and bā (“scar,” “scab”)—will also
be pronounced ba no matter what their meaning is, and
no matter what additional radicals they have with them.

How to use this to read fluently

So you know that these phonetic elements exist, but

how do you use them to read? Well, to start with, check
out this amazing spreadsheet, which lists almost all of
the phonetic elements. I would suggest you learn as
many of the phonetic sets in this document as possible,
and then see if you can identify them in unknown
pieces of text.

Often you’ll know the pinyin of a word far before you

know its characters, and so by sounding the characters
out using these phonetic sets, you’ll have a good
chance of guessing their meanings.

Sneaky problems that may trip up

beginning readers

Okay, so now that you know how you should be

reading Chinese characters, it’s also important to
identify the common problems and mistakes that
learners make when reading Chinese as a second
language.

No two characters are the same—avoid lookalikes!

One of the most common mistakes that learners make

is confusing two very similar characters. These include
characters that are almost identical except for the
radical.

Such character pairs—for example, 情 qíng (“feeling,”

“emotion”) and 清 qīng (“pure,” “just”)—often are made
more confusing by the fact that they have the same
pronunciations.

Another kind of character similarity, such as that

between ⽊ 术
mù and shù (“method,” “technique”) can
occur when two characters very different in meaning
and pronunciation have just a single stroke of
difference between them.

Watch out for characters with alternate

pronunciations

Another common error encountered by learners is

caused by characters that have more than one possible
pronunciation depending on their context. Some of the
着
most common include , which can be pronounced as
重
zhe as well as zhāo, and , which can be pronounced
as zhòng or chóng in some circumstances.

But luckily, such multi-pronunciation characters are

quite rare, and they can be easily learnt and
recognized.

Tips for reading unknown characters

One final area of difficulty, which every learner without

exception will encounter…is a text that’s just full of
unknown characters. While it is impossible to guess the
meaning of every character, there are some helpful
hints that can be followed.

Nouns can be guessed by their radicals

With some understanding of Chinese grammar, it is

reasonably easy to tell which words in a given
sentence are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. For
the nouns, at least, it is often possible to work out what
kind of object an unknown word is, based off its
radicals and knowledge of the content.

⼼
For instance, words with the heart radical  xīn
generally refer to emotions or feelings, while something
⾦
with the gold radical  jīn is likely some kind of metal
or element.

Identifying toponyms and names

Some of the most hard-to-read characters come in the

forms of toponyms (place names). Often these can be
completely unique characters—as in the case of the 峨
峨眉⼭
é in   é méi shān (a mountain in Sichuan
province)—or be otherwise incredibly rare.

In many cases, like in the previous example, it is easy to

tell this is a toponym by the fact that the character for a
certain kind of place (such as a mountain, lake, river or
valley) is used.

In other cases, for the transliteration of non-Chinese

toponyms or the names of people, a very small group
of characters is used consisting of basic phonetic
sounds. Such characters are easy to identify and read,
even if their actual meaning is unknown.

So put your skills to the test—get

reading!

Now that you know about how the Chinese character

system works, along with its intricacies and difficulties,
the next step is obvious.

You just have to start practicing.

Read, read, read Chinese, and then read some more!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient

and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click
here to get a copy. (Download)