Where can I find the Chinese Alphabet?
” etc. You can stop your search now because there is no such thing as Chinese alphabet. The English word “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha and beta) because it was the Greeks who adopted this writing system from the Middle East and spread it to the rest of Europe. Every alphabet system consists of a rather small number ( 20 – 50 ) of letters that represent sound values used in spoken language. Each of the letters of the alphabet represents a sound that generally has no particular meaning. Using the letters of the alphabet, one can write down the words of spoken language. There are no letters in Chinese and therefore, there is no alphabet in Chinese writing. The earlier form of characters developed from the graphic representation of certain objects, for example, the shape of a moon was used to write a moon. As time went on, it became much more complex or even possible at all to represent words in graphic. The majority of the symbols today do not ha
” etc. You can stop your search now because there is no such thing as Chinese alphabet. There is however Mandarin Chinese Phonetics. The English word “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha and beta) because it was the Greeks who adopted this writing system from the Middle East and spread it to the rest of Europe. Every alphabet system consists of a rather small number ( 20 – 50 ) of letters that represent sound values used in spoken language. Each of the letters of the alphabet represents a sound that generally has no particular meaning. Using the letters of the alphabet, one can write down the words of spoken language. There are no letters in Chinese and therefore, there is no alphabet in Chinese writing. The earlier form of characters developed from the graphic representation of certain objects, for example, the shape of a moon was used to write a moon. As time went on, it became much more complex or even possible at all to represent words in graphic
There isn’t one – if you mean a set of basic Chinese symbols that are used to spell words. But there is pinyin – the official romanization system. Most people who learn Chinese start by learning pronunciation – these days Pinyin is the most commonly used tool. Should I learn Simplified or Traditional Characters? The serious student who is interested in reading literary or academic works written in Chinese must also learn two forms of the written language. One system is the traditional one used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and most overseas Chinese communities. The other is the simplified system now officially used in China, which came into being after the 1949 Communist Revolution and was promoted as a way of increasing literacy among the uneducated masses. But there is a certain degree of overlap between the two systems. Anyone who has learned traditional characters should not have too many problems learning simplified characters (and vice versa). Here is an example of the two systems. Are Ch
There is no such thing as a Chinese ‘alphabet’. Chinese is not written in letters that then make up words, but in characters or ideograms that make up concepts. . . .more or less. Nevertheless, simply googling ‘chinese alphabet’ brings up a number of interesting sites. Try some of the following to see if they are what you are looking for: There are something like 4000 basic Chinese characters. Zhongwen.com contains the complete text of Amazon’s (sometimes) best-selling and (frequently) best-reviewed : Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary (Distributed by Yale Univ. Press. ) http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese…. The Chinese writing system Chinese is written with characters known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi). Each character represents a syllable of spoken Chinese and also has a meaning. The characters were originally pictures of people, animals or other things but over the centuries they have become increasingl
