How does chinese work

If you need to type in many different languages, the Q International Keyboard can help. It enables you to type almost any language that uses the Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets, and is free.

If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon , or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living. Note : all links on this site to Amazon. A character is not a random drawing. It is made of strokes. There are 6 basic strokes. Some of them have several variants , and strokes can be combined to create more strokes. But the basic idea is that most characters are made from a small number of strokes.

Strokes have names. By only naming the strokes, I can describe any character. In a way, strokes are closer to the concept of letters than characters are. They are the smallest unit of Chinese writing. Stroke order is important. Kids learn which stroke goes before which at school. It is important because of how muscle memory works. Our brain is able to automatically remember a complex sequence of movement. If strokes were written in a random order, they would be much harder to remember.

There are only a few rules for stroke ordering. Characters that look very complex at first, are in fact just a familiar sequence of strokes. H M S In the news. Dylan Love. Each character is made up of an intricate series of strokes, sometimes as many as A casual Chinese writer will use an "input method editor". In the People's Republic of China, they use Pinyin. The best Pinyin methods use some clever tricks. There's even a speed-typing method. There's even an old-school way to do it.

English keyboards can be pretty wild, too. Loading Something is loading. In non-alphabetic orthographies, such as Chinese or Cherokee, the symbol represents a larger sound unit such as a syllable e. Over orthographies exist today.

Each orthography can be classified as alphabetic, such as English, or non-alphabetic, such as Chinese. In this article, we will first learn about the characteristics of different orthographies. Then, we will use these characteristics to help understand how different writing systems affect the process of reading.

We will then learn about the brain regions involved in reading. First, let us talk about alphabetic orthographies. There are several different alphabets that are used to create written languages. For example, English uses the Latin alphabet, and 26 symbols, or letters, to represent the spoken language. There are other alphabets that use different sets of symbols to represent the spoken language, but still code the language at the level of the phoneme. These alphabets include the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used for the Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian languages; the Devanagari alphabet, which is used for Hindi, one of the official languages of India, the Greek alphabet, which is only used for the Greek language, and the Hangul alphabet, which is used for the Korean language.

Some languages, such as Serbo-Croat, use both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets. However, today, we often use accent marks to show where a vowel should be, leading many people to classify both Hebrew and Arabic as alphabets, not abjads. Alphabetic orthographies also differ in how well the phonemes sounds and the graphemes symbols or letters match up. In some languages, such as Spanish, Italian, and German, almost every letter represents only one sound.

Although not everyone agrees on how to compare the consistencies between letters and sounds across languages, researchers generally agree that Finnish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, Serbo-Croat, Turkish, and Korean are relatively shallow or consistent orthographies, while Portuguese, French, and Danish contain more inconsistent mappings between phonemes and graphemes.

English is the most inconsistent language in the world! Now, let us talk about non-alphabetic orthographies. Non-alphabetic orthographies represent either the syllable for example, Cherokee, Tamil, or Japanese Kana or a one-syllable unit of meaning as in Chinese, Japanese Kanji with each symbol.

Similar to the alphabetic orthographies, a unit of spoken language is represented by a symbol, but in the non-alphabetic orthographies, unlike the alphabetic ones, that unit of spoken language is larger than just a phoneme. Chinese is often referred to as a pictograph a language made up of pictures , because people think that the characters are pictures of the words they represent.

In fact, very few Chinese characters are actually pictures of the words they represent. Rather, in Chinese, the symbols represent a unit of pronunciation a syllable that is also a unit of meaning a morpheme , thus Chinese is considered a morpho-syllabic writing system. A phonetic radical is just one part of the character that provides a clue as to how to say the word.