We need to clarify right at the beginning that we are not learning Chinese (Mandarin) language, or Japanese language, any more than we learned any Korean language in 2009/30. I personally have no present interest in doing so or ability to do so, and assume the same about the reader. But, as an intellectual exercise in culture and cultural history, just as we learned a bit about how Korean is written, I have found it possible to work with written Chinese, in other words Chinese logograms or sinograms, and actually survive the experience. I can make the statement that any reader who reads this posting will, without any further effort, be able to read within it a text I’ve specially prepared that are in English but include 21 Chinese characters, and will understand every single word, guaranteed. Just don’t jump ahead.

I also have to explain one caveat. We will be reviewing “the easiest of the difficult”. In other words, perhaps 80-90% of all Chinese characters are sound-based, and are much more complex than what we will be looking at, and require knowledge of the Mandarin words themselves, since they are combinations of symbols, part of which include some phonetic hints. You will NOT be able to read Chinese at the end of this, but you (and I) will know a great deal more than we did before. Doing this is an excellent intellectual and cultural exercise.

Hànzi   We can also use the native Mandarin word for Chinese characters, which is hànzi. You will, I hope, immediately recognize the word “han” in it, referring to the Han Chinese. We earlier looked at the word hànzi actually written in hànzi, and will see it again below, but here we’re looking at it in Romanized form, in other words, the standard transliteration in the Roman (Latin) alphabet. In this transliteration Z always represents the combination TS, so read hànzi as hàn.tsi. The downward accent mark represents a downward tone, which we’ll talk about later.

[Before we continue, I have to shatter our complacency about the Roman/Latin alphabet being the be-all and end-all of things. While there is a standard Romanization of Chinese, there is also a standard Cyrillization of Chinese, used in Russia and elsewhere, presumably including Mongolia. Cyrillized off the standard chart listed in Wikipedia, hàn is хань (which, as han’ makes sense to me) and zi is цзы (which as tszy makes less sense to me) so hànzi would appear as ханьцзы. I cite this just to show there is more than one way of doing things and that “our” way isn’t the only one.]

PICTOGRAMS Some logograms are pictograms. We use pictograms (“picture-writing”) all the time in daily life. They are stylized drawings of the subject matter. To use a public rest room we look for the pictograms of a man or a woman. To check handicapped accessibility, we look for the pictogram of a person in a wheelchair. On the road, the pictogram of a leaping stag warns of a deer crossing, and of a cow, a cattle crossing. I can also visualize a kindergartener drawing a stylized picture of a house with smoke coming out of the chimney, or anyone drawing stylized stick figures to represent people.

It’s erroneous to think that all Chinese characters (logograms, sinograms, hànzi) are pictographic, because in reality only about some 600 are, or about 4% of the total. However, they are among the very oldest of the characters. I knew only one character before I started the current research, and I want to start with it.

This pictogrammic character represents a person. I see two legs and a head, so it certainly works for me. It’s as close to a stick figure as you can reasonably expect. I’m advised it corresponds to the Mandarin word rén, and would therefore correspond to the English word person. Remember it’s language-neutral, so it corresponds to whatever the Cantonese, or Japanese word would be with this meaning. And, if you like, we can exaggerate the thought to where it corresponds to Spanish persona and German Mensch.

Remember, Chinese writing doesn’t use circles, so if you have a hard time picturing a square sun, then get a life. Let’s interpret why there’s a bar across the center. Could it be the horizon? In Mandarin it’s read as ri.

I’ll admit, this one gave me pause for a moment. Why were they saying this was an easy one? Then it made sense. First, it’s based on the character for sun, so you know you’re going in the right direction of something in the sky. Then I noticed that the left stroke has that charming curve, which is surely the division of dark and light on the half-moon. This one’s a little more of a stretch, but has its own logic. It’s yuè in Mandarin.

I see one bar reaching the top, and the other two reaching slopes on either side. I like it just fine for a mountain, or shan in Mandarin.

Well, let’s work at this one. I see the trunk, and some top branches. Then it seems to show the skirt-like spreading branches of a fir tree. It’s just a bit harder to see, but it IS a tree, and by extension, can mean wood. In Mandarin it’s mù.

We have a squared circle again, representing a big, open mouth. By extension, it's any opening, or a hole.

This at first looks like the character for “sun” with an extra crossbar, but then you’re looking at it wrong. It’s a squared circle (the pupil) within a larger squared circle (the rest of the eye).

IDEOGRAMS Some logograms are ideograms, or “idea-writing”. They are also a very small category of hànzi. Ideograms attempt to visualize abstract concepts that you can’t really draw pictures of. Here are three ideograms at once.

I will not insult your intelligence by discussing these three ideograms, but we can again say that 一 corresponds to Mandarin yi, but Cantonese yat, and Hokkien chit. These are concepts, and represent no pronunciations, just like 7 represents sept in French but sieben in German. Incidentally, Arabic numbers as we know them are certainly used within Chinese text for years, times of day, and so on. Now here are two more ideograms at once.

They are pictures of ideas. I am informed that the first in Mandarin is shàng and the second xià. We will work with the pronunciation of these transliterations later.

This is another one of my favorites because of its simplicity. The line goes right down the middle of the rectangle, and couldn’t make a clearer statement.

We’re back to our tree once again. Add a crossbar at the bottom, and you’re pointing to the root (běn). Add a crossbar to the top, and you’re pointing to the top, or apex (mò) of the tree.

COMPOUNDS Logograms can be ideogrammic compounds, in other words, a combination of pictograms and/or ideograms to create a third character, in which each element hints at the combined meaning. Maybe 13% of hànzi fall into this category.

Here we take the character for “person”, but have to condense it, in other words, squeeze it together, to fit in the new space. We add it to the character for “tree”. The resulting new character has the intended idea of a person leaning against a tree, that is, resting.

Now there’s no reason to get lost here because of a slight bit of complexity. We basically have a tree here, and we’ve squeezed the sun to make it smaller to give the illusion of seeing the sun through a tree. It’s apparently dawn, so we’re looking east (dōng), which is what the new character signifies. There is a certain East Asian charm in this.

Combine both the sun and the moon, squeeze them together to fit a bit better, and things are as bright (mìng) as you could want.

Start with one tree, then double it with some compression, to signify a grove (lín). Then triple it with even more compression, to signify a forest (sēn). This is very logical.

I just love this one for its pristine logic. Put people together and you have everybody. What more can you say?

I have to tell a behind-the-scenes story at this point. I hope it’s clear that I don’t have real access to these characters and am just copying-and-pasting them from other sources, largely Wikipedia. But I had read somewhere earlier about this last one, but couldn’t find it again. Worse, it seemed to me that it was just described and not illustrated. Could it just be two characters next to each other, or might they each be condensed to fit as in “rest”? I played around for quite a while, and then it occurred to me to write “ 人” and “everybody” in the Google search box and see if I found anything of use. I’d never used a Chinese character with Google before. And lo and behold, I got a longer listing, primarily in Chinese, but that included a couple of YouTube links to two popular TV shows:

Sure enough, the two characters in question meaning “everybody” are written full-size, even though I can’t read a bit of the rest. Problem solved.

Using Hànzi   We have now learned 21 hànzi. Let’s see if we can read this paragraph I've constructed in English that’s peppered with hànzi throughout.

Simplification of Hànzi   Some might think the entire logographic system to be ponderous and detrimental to literacy. There is occasionally talk to replace it entirely with the current Romanization system, pinyin—after all, it worked in Vietnam. On the other hand, I’ve read that some are so proud of it that they want it declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. My own opinion is that it should be replaced, but maintained as an artistic and cultural heritage entity, to be studied by those who are interested in it.

But a compromise of sorts is also in the works. Some of the hànzi are particularly complicated to read and memorize, as they include numerous strokes to draw them. Mainland China in 1954, to promote literacy, established a large set of simplified symbols, which are now official there, and are also used in Singapore and Malaysia. However, this upsets traditionalists, and the traditional system is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and most overseas areas.

As an example using one symbol we know, dōng, the Mandarin word for “east”, continues to be written traditionally as 東, but in simplified form it’s now 东. That’s fine, and I still see the tree, but the sun is now just a little stroke in the center left.

For a larger illustration, here, written vertically in both the traditional (in black) and simplified (in red) systems, are the two syllables that indicate the word Hànzi (Image by Kjoonlee & Tomchen). As seems typical, not all symbols get simplified.

Romanization   Before getting into current Romanization, which is using the Roman (Latin) alphabet as an alternative to another system, we need to review two older methods.

CHINESE POSTAL MAP ROMANIZATION Dating from the 19C and into much of the 20C, the Romanization that had been agreed upon by various postal authorities for Chinese names was standard, such as for Hong Kong and Peking. The problem with that was that it was Europe-oriented, that is, made to be pleasing to the Western eye and ear, and sometimes had little to do with reality. We already discussed the huge province in Western China that is culturally part of Central Asia, known as Sinkiang. That’s certainly easy for Westerners to pronounce, write, and remember, but it’s not accurate. As mentioned, in Wade-Giles it’s Hsin¹-chiang¹ and in pinyin it’s Xīnjiāng, both of which spellings may offend the Western eye, but which are far more accurately Chinese. The Postal Map Romanization was also used extensively by cartographers. It was somewhat based on Wade-Giles (see below) but used some common European place names, overriding the Wade-Giles system. Two other Postal Map names are Canton, now in pinyin Guăngzhōu (ZH=CH), and Chungking, now in pinyin Chóngqìng (Q=CH). We mention this system simply to explain these older names, which are familiar, but now largely outdated.

WADE-GILES ROMANIZATION This is usually shortened to just Wade-Giles. There had been Romanization attempts earlier, but the greatest success was had for Romanizing the Mandarin of Beijing by Thomas Wade, A British ambassador to China, Chinese scholar, and the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, who published a Chinese text in English in 1867. Herbert Giles, a British diplomat in China, used the system in his Chinese-English dictionary in 1892, and further refined it in 1912 with his son Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum. Thus the system has a very prestigious, but very British, lineage.

Wade-Giles continued in popularity, and remained the main Chinese Romanization system for most of the 20C. I think one has to know Chinese to be able to comment on it adequately and wisely, but I am informed that critics say it was designed for Chinese specialists, was felt to be non-intuitive for non-specialists, and is not useful for teaching Chinese pronunciation to outsiders or to represent Chinese adequately. I am only the messenger.

After reviewing the spelling system of Wade-Giles, I can see some advantages and some disadvantages of it. For two kinds of [TS] it used spellings of TS and TS’, which is easier for outsiders than the modern pinyin spellings of Z and C. For the two kinds of [SH] it used HS and SH, while pinyin uses X and SH. But the most striking difference is in the four kinds of [CH] that Chinese has, where Wade-Giles used just two symbols, CH and CH’, but pinyin uses the very non-intuitive and unusual spellings of J, Q, ZH, CH.

I mention Wade-Giles since most Chinese who emigrated from China years ago will still spell their names with CH, like Chang and Chin, while in China today there would be odder-looking spellings as above. Also one still sees proper names outside China such as Hsu, which would also be different within China today.

We will talk about Chinese tones later, but let me just say that Wade-Giles used a superscript numbering system to identify the four tones, while pinyin uses much more logical accent marks going in the direction of the tones. To illustrate several points just made, I’ll copy the following again from a few paragraphs earlier:

Now notice the tones indicated by superscript numbers versus accent marks; HS versus X for [SH]; CH versus J for [CH]. Wade-Giles uses frequent hyphenation, while pinyin often writes the syllables as one word.

PINYIN The full name is Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu refers to the Chinese language (you’ll note the word “Han” included). I’m told that pinyin can translate as “spelling sound” or “spelled sound”. I wonder if you can stretch that and call it “alphabetic writing”.

Wade-Giles was effectively replaced in 1958 by Hanyu Pinyin, developed on Mainland China by the government. Taiwan held out using it, but approved it in 2008 and it became official in Taiwan the first of this year.

[Given the world of politics, it shouldn’t surprise that Taiwan developed its own system called Tongyong Pinyin, which was official in Taiwan from 2002 to 2008 and has now been dropped. It used, for instance, an unusual JH for ZH (Wade-Giles CH). I only mention this since I’ve noticed my Taipei map has a little of each of the unusual spellings in street names, since things are now in flux. Some Wade-Giles spellings remain from earlier, some Tongyong Pinyin that had been recently introduced remains from that period, and some Hanyu Pinyin spellings have now started to spread. Welcome to Taiwan.]

In the face of the formidable hànzi characters, pinyin is used to teach schoolchildren, those in adult education, and foreigners Mandarin pronunciation. It is also used to spell Chinese names on foreign maps and Chinese political and historical figures on an international basis. It addition, it’s used to enter Chinese characters on computer keyboards.

Not only does the traveler need to recognize pinyin names, so does anyone reading a Western newspaper or history book. Here are some particularly striking highlights of changes from the familiarity of Wade-Giles, followed by some specific examples. The only comment I have to make about it is that, when they decided they needed more letters or digraphs (two-letter combinations), they just used up any leftovers willy-nilly. The results to the Western eye seem wildly unusual. It’s hard to us to see that Qin should stand for Chin, especially knowing that in Wade-Giles it was indeed Ch’in. But below is how things are today for the traveler and newspaper-reading Westerner, and apparently these spellings parallel the reality of the language more clearly to distinguish, say, the four Mandarin variations of the [CH] sound.

Note the tendency to more frequently write words together as a single word. The tonal marks we’ll discuss below.

The martial art kung¹ fu¹ appears as gōngfū (see 1 & 2 above).

The political party Kuo²min²tang¹ appears as Guómíndāng (see 1).

The former Chinese leader Mao² Tse²-tung1 is now Máo Zédōng (see 3, 1, 2).

The famous mainland city of the Terra Cotta Soldiers, whose Postal Map name was Sian and was Hsi¹’an¹ in Wade-Giles, is Xī’ān (see 4), pronounced as in “[Is] she on [time]?” The apostrophe keeps syllables apart that might otherwise appear joinable.

The Chinese name for China, Chung¹-kuo², now appears as Zhōngguó (see 5, 2, 1)

The capital of mainland China was once known in the West as Pekin, from which we get the name of the dog, pekinese, and also Peking, from which we get the name for Peking duck. It is now known as Beijing (with the J pronounced as ZH as in Zhivago). In Wade-Giles it was Pei³-ching1 and in pinyin it is Běijīng (see 1, 4), with J continuing to represent a form of [CH], so note that in reality, the pronunciation of the name varies between English and Chinese. [Note that some things are forever. The dog remains a pekinese and not “*beijingese”, and Peking duck is not now “*Beijing duck”.]

The capital of Taiwan in Wade-Giles was Tai²-pei³ and in pinyin is Táiběi (see 1). However, I’ve read that the city council wishes to continue use of “Taipei” because of its recognizability internationally, which is surprising, given that Peking is now Beijing.

Tones   The only aspect of spoken Mandarin we’ll discuss is the tones, since I know a little about that, and it’s a good intellectual exercise to help compare Western and Eastern languages. Beyond that, there’s really no practical use for travelers beyond further cultural understanding.

We use tones all the time, and tonal languages like Mandarin use tones all the time, but differently. Comparing the two is the intellectual exercise I referred to. I suggest that the reader try saying both the English and Chinese words out loud for purposes of comparison.

Tones, which involve changing pitch (not loudness) up or down, or perhaps leaving it level, are used in Western languages just to show emotion or express emphasis. In no way do they change meaning. Let’s use the simple word “no”.

See if you can now say all five possibilities, that is, neutral, then four tones, when they’re out of context. If you can’t, go back into context until you can:

Now here’s the difference with the tonal languages. Tones like this are incidental in English and most other Western languages. They express mostly emotion, maybe emphasis sometimes, but they do not change meaning whatsoever. No matter what else, you are always saying “no” here.

But a slight majority of the languages of the world are called tonal languages because in them, when you add a tone, you change the meaning of the word entirely, just as if you’d added another sound at the end of the word.

Take our word MEN. Add a D to form MEND and you have a different word. But add a down-and-up tone in English MĚN and all you have is a question, but it’s still the same word. But if you were speaking Thai, Vietnamese, or Mandarin, MĚN, as contrasted with MEN, could mean something like “goldfish” and have nothing to do with the word without a tone: tones change meaning, which is why these are called tonal languages.

Now let’s make the jump to the most widely-spoken tonal language, Mandarin, which indeed has just that, four tones as well as a neutral, non-tone. Here’s a chart of the Four Tones of Mandarin.

Try saying nō in the 1st Tone, but it has to be high-pitched. Then try nò in the 4th Tone, which starts at the same pitch, but drops way down. These two contrast well. Then do nó, the 2nd Tone, that starts relatively high before rising, and finally nŏ, the 3rd Tone, that starts relatively low before bouncing back to go quite high. Finally do a neutral no with no tones at all. Welcome to Mandarin.

Actually, do take a look at how Mandarin does this. As you may imagine, you might be able to find pairs of Mandarin words which differ just by tones and nothing else. Maybe three words? Maybe four? But all five possibilities? Yes, it can happen. I’ve seen the following demonstration in the past where one single toneless Mandarin word seems to appear as part of four other words that differ from it only by tone. To show that they’re different in written form, we’ll include the hànzi, traditional first, then simplified, if any. The Mandarin word that corresponds to:

These are five different written words corresponding to five different spoken words. (A question particle is a word in some languages that forms a question out of a statement just by being there. For instance, if English had such a thing, a statement like “It’s raining” could appear as “It’s raining [ma]”, which would mean “Is it raining?”

Look back and you’ll see how Wade-Giles rather clumsily actually numbered the syllables that had tones from 1 to 4, a neutral one either being unmarked, or showing a 0. But pinyin uses just the system we’ve been demonstrating, which is very intuitive.

Just for your own fun—and I don’t propose you ever try this in public—try putting your Mandarin tones to use on these words:

If nothing else, you should now understand why Chinese and other tonal languages sound so sing-song-ish.