Chinese Character Overview

This section is totally for beginners. After the 5-minute tour of this section, you will have good idea of Chinese characters, the foundation Chinese language.

Character is King

Character, the smallest meaningful unit in Chinese, is the foundation in Chinese such as word in English. Chinese characters are also often referred to Chinese symbols.

A small percentage of characters look like drawing, which are called pictogram. Centuries ago, Chinese people drew some simple paintings to show what they wanted to express.

Look at the up-right picture, could you get hint what 人 means? You may have got it already -人 means human or person (unisex). It is a simple picture of a man's side-view.

The down-right is another example, in which the character 女 means woman or female. It is a simple picture of a woman sitting in the traditional Chinese posture in ancient times.

» Tip

Not all Chinese characters are meant to look like the things they represent. Today, only 4% of the total characters are pictograms in current use.

While there are only three one-letter English words, a, I and O, one-symbol Chinese words are common. For example, the character 天 means day or sky; the symbol 空 means empty in English.

Combination of two or more characters always brings a new word. For example, 天空 means sky in English.

Character Forms

There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. Entire mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified Chinese characters while the Traditional Chinese characters only used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. The following table may give you some sense.

Simplified Chinese Character	Traditional Chinese Character	English Translation
龙	龍	Dragon
风	風	Wind
马	馬	Horse
天	天	Day; Sky
月	月	Moon

You maybe have noticed that the simplified version and traditional version of the last two symbols are same. Yes, not every character has been simplified, only some complicated forms. Some characters are totally same in both forms.

As personal opinion, we strongly recommend you learn Simplified Chinese characters, because:

1. They are much easier for memory than traditional ones.
2. Keep in mind that all people from mainland China use the Simplified Chinese symbols. That means you are studying a writing system used by more than 1.3 trillion people

Important !

Focus your efforts on just one of these two forms to avoid getting confused.

Number of Characters in Use

There are over 80,000 Chinese characters, but most of them are seldom used today. So how many Chinese characters do you need to know? For basic reading and writing of modern Chinese, you only need a few thousands. Here are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters:

Tier of MFU Chinese Characters	Coverage Rate
Most frequently used 500 characters:	72.1%
Most frequently used 1,000 characters:	90.0%
Most frequently used 2,500 characters:	98.0%
Most frequently used 3,500 characters:	99.5%