成人快手

What are Mandarin characters?

Burt Bessington

Unlike the English language, which uses the Roman alphabet, Mandarin does not have an alphabet.

Instead there are Mandarin characters, called hàn zì, and each character represents a syllable. Most words have one, two or three characters.

Each Mandarin character is made from different components.

Burt Bessington

Components of a character

There are usually two components to a character:

  • a radical
  • a phonetic

Let's look at both of these in the character 尘ā (mother):

The Mandarin character for 'mother' has the radical for 'woman' on the left. Its pronunciation is found in the character for 'horse' to the right of it.

Radical

The radical gives you a clue to the character's meaning.

For example, in the character 尘ā meaning ‘mother’ the radical is 苍ǚ (woman) because of the connection often made between mothers and women.

Phonetic

The other part of the character is called the phonetic (pronunciation).

In the ancient form of the language this showed how the character was pronounced and in modern Mandarin it can sometimes give you a clue about the pronunciation, for example 尘ǎ (horse) in 尘ā (mother).

Warning! The phonetic is only a clue, not an accurate guide.

For example, in the character 办à苍 (to look at), the radical is 尘ù (eye), which helps with the meaning, but the phonetic 蝉丑ǒ耻 (hand) does not give any guide to pronunciation.

Also, sometimes the radical is the whole character, like in 尘ǎ (horse), so there is no phonetic component.

To know how to pronounce a character you'll need to know its pinyin.

Mandarin characters started out more like ‘pictures’ but have changed over 4,000 years into the Mandarin characters used today.

This can be seen clearly in the development of the character for 'mountain' ( 蝉丑ā苍):

The development of the Mandarin character mountain over time.

The smallest units of Mandarin characters are strokes. You can find out more about them in our 2nd level guide Mandarin grammar: Strokes.

Click below to download a template for practicing how to write Mandarin characters

Download the PDF and use the grid to help you practice writing Mandarin characters.

Practice writing Mandarin characters

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