Learning Chinese Through Group-Character Analyses: v. 2

The Chinese language is a language with a clear pronunciation and largely unvariable short and simple word forms. The tonal qualities of the language render its information capacity larger than other non-tonal languages, while making Chinese a beautiful spoken language. Written Chinese follows certain rules which shape the characters. A dozen simple strokes make up more than 200 "one-member" or "root" characters, of which no more than 100 are commonly used and alone will enable the student to recognize 40 percent of the characters in current publications. Chinese characters are also known as ideographic characters. Over 90 percent of these ideographs are picto-phonetic or compound characters composed of at least two "root" characters, one of which is the pictographic component expressing the meaning, and the other the phonetic component denoting the pronunciation. Thus the information contained in small square-shaped Chinese characters is much greater than, for example, words in an alphabetic system. The value of Chinese characters have been appreciated throughout the world. Just as the American linguist Gary Gennings exclaimed, "The Chinese language is the language of wisdoms!"