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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.

It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.

A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!

For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.


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  • (Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:51PM

    by Rich (945) on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:51PM (#277689) Journal

    it was referring to components specifically, and not radicals.

    I wasn't aware of the distinction. It doesn't help that "radical" lists can be found everywhere, even when looking specifically for "component list". I actually wasn't able to find a dedicated comprehensive component list at all. Also, the dictionares themselves offer "multi-radical-lookup" these days, which directly contradicts the explaining article's statement of "Each Chinese character has one and only one radical".

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @08:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @08:29AM (#278113)

    Radicals are historically prevalent, that's why you'll find much more information about them. They are useful when looking up words in paper dictionaries (who does that anymore?), but not a great tool to explain the structure of characters. Some people are working to fix this: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/ [outlier-linguistics.com]
    But it's a recent idea (compared to radicals), and popular education is slow to adopt it.