Forums » News and Announcements
How Many Letters are in the Chinese Alphabet?
-
How Many Letters are in the Chinese Alphabet?
The answer to how many letters are in the Chinese alphabet is plain and simple. None! Because the Chinese language adopts a non-alphabetic script for writing. Chinese has characters and tones instead of letters and an alphabet. Each character is a logogram representing a word or morpheme. This guide may shed light on how the Chinese writing system work without an alphabet and letters. To get more news about chinese alphabet a to z, you can visit shine news official website.
Does Chinese have an Alphabet?
Such a thing as the A to Z Chinese alphabet doesn’t exist. Although previous attempts were made to romanize Chinese using the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese script, they all failed in the end. Hanyu Pinyin, the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese, was invented during the process.
Chinese Pinyin alphabet is a life safer for Chinese learners familiar with the Latin alphabet because it includes diacritics indicating the tones of different characters. Pinyin without diacritics is used for spelling Chinese names and entering Chinese characters into computer systems via standard keyboards like QWERTY.
As the chart shows below, the Chinese Pinyin alphabet encompasses 23 consonants/initials (聲母) and 24 vowels/finals (韻母). Mastering this Chinese phonetic system allows you to get the correct pronunciation of just about any Chinese character using a dictionary.
How Many Chinese Characters are There?
The exact total number of Chinese characters is unknown. The largest recorded number is 106,230 characters in the Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants (異體字字典) published in 2004. Tens of thousands may sound like an enormous figure, but the number of commonly used characters only tops 3,500. This means you only need 3,500 essential Chinese characters under your belt to read a Chinese newspaper.
Schoolchildren in China are required to learn a minimum of 3,500 characters. Yet the vocabulary of the highly educated can easily go over 5,000 or even 6,000. As for acing the Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK), you only need to familiarize yourself with 2,600 characters. This number is so much less formidable, isn’t it?
Chinese don’t have letters. Unlike the alphabetic writing languages that Westerners are familiar with, Chinese is a pictorial language that uses different components to form a character. Writing a Chinese character is a lot like building blocks – with the blocks being the character components.The radicals are sometimes conflated with the other two components. You can consider these radicals as the Mandarin / Traditional Chinese alphabet, with which you can build a character with all the strokes needed.
Mastering the Chinese can be a Herculean task. But it is not simply because of the many strokes in each character. Chinese characters do not always look like the ones listed above. In fact, it is safe to say even a regular highly-educated native Chinese speaker can’t recognize two of these variant Chinese characters.
Chinese is a challenging language to master for a variety of reasons.
First and foremost, its writing system is nothing like what the alphabetic language speakers (or anyone using the Latin alphabet) accustom to. Secondly, the tonal system of the Chinese language is extremely complicated because sometimes, one character could have multiple tones, and the same pronunciation could also apply to dozens of characters. Thirdly, unlike English or other Latin-based languages in which the number of letters in alphabet is only 26, you need to memorize thousands of characters to have a basic command of the Chinese language.
Experts estimated that it would take at least 2,200 class hours to become fluent in Chinese. If you’re planning to expand your business in China, the fastest way would be to work with a local translation company that is fluent in your language and native to Chinese, Simplified or Traditional. If you need such a service, look no further than Wordspath!
We are a China-based professional language service provider with 20 years in business. With a global network of 30,000+ linguistic experts native to 150+ languages, we can connect you with the best-qualified translators that meet your specific needs. Please contact us should you have a project at hand.