Today’s All About Chinese lesson focuses on the origins of written Chinese–the only writing system that has been in use continuously for over 3,000 years.

All characters are made up of smaller ‘picture’ elements within the character. Some of these smaller pictures within the character give a hint as to meaning and pronunciation (though not always). The first Chinese characters were simple objects like “human”, “hand”, “foot”, “mountain”, “sun”, “moon” and “tree”. Then logical combinations of the simple characters followed. These simple characters also sometimes serve as the root of a more complex character, and are called “radicals”.

Most linguists believe that writing was invented in China during the latter half of the 2nd millennium BC. The earliest recognizable examples of written Chinese date from 1500-950 BC (Shang dynasty).

The traditional form of Chinese characters was widely used up until the mid-20^th century. Most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today were the result of simplifications made by the government of China in the 1950s and 60s. The simplified characters have a lot less strokes and certain parts of some characters were completely eliminated. The simplified characters are also used in Singapore, but in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia the traditional characters are still used.

The workable literacy in the Chinese language only requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.

Elements that make up a Chinese word
Chinese verbs and adjectives generally consist of one character (syllable) but nouns often consist of two, three or more characters (syllables).

When written on the page, each character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is or how many strokes it contains. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up compound words are not grouped together.
Pronunciation
Pinyin is a phonetic system used to teach standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and to enter Chinese characters on computers.

Initials and finals are the elements that make up a word in pinyin. Nearly each Chinese syllable are spelled with one initial sound followed by one final sound. There are only about 400 different combinations of initials and finals in Chinese, of course each Chinese character can also have four possible tones, so that adds to the amount of individual sounds.