After many years of studying Chinese I came to realize it's really hard to describe the nature of Chinese characters in one word.If we consider Chinese characters "logosyllabic", which means each character doesn't only represent a syllable, but also has a meaning attached to it, there are some exceptions like 蝴蝶 which means "butterfly" but each of the characters 蝴 and 蝶 don't have any meanings when taken separately, but these kinds of characters still make a very small percentage out of the total numbers of Chinese characters, so you might think "logosyllabic" is the closest you can get.However, when we consider that Chinese characters are used across different languages in East Asia, things get more complicated.For example, in Japanese, many Chinese characters are used to represent words with more than one syllable, so it's not logosyllabic anymore, but the general relation between character and meaning is still there, so I would define Chinese characters as "logographic" instead of "logosyllabic".Anyway, the fact that Chinese characters are so flexible in their relation to their meanings and pronunciation makes them really hard to put them into a specific category.

I want to note that children in China do not start from pinyin. They start with the characters themselves, and know already hundreds of characters before starting pinyin.

Actually, the way that children in Hong Kong learn Cantonese is through directly following how teachers speak, instead of using pinying. It is because pinying in Cantonese is rare and not common. Plus Cantonese is a diglossia. The way we write and speak is totally different. Thoese reasons largely increase the learning threshold of Cantonese.

The standard of literacy is 1500 characters, and a well-educated native speaker can recognize 4000-4500. If not for interest or major in ancient Chinese, very few people know more than 5000 characters. 8000 is too much, 通用规范汉字表（General Standard Chinese Character List）only contains 8105, many of which are only used in names, places, or very specific fields.

Love the simplified explanation! But for your next video , could you maybe add (and expound) that Chinese characters on their own can represent not only a syllable, but also an idea or object hence the sheer amount of characters created. (you may take my words with a grain of salt as I do not speak a Chinese language and I got this information from wikipedia and omniglot along with beforehand knowledge, I simply take orthography as a hobby)

Very informative and lot of work & research went in this video. 👏 Awaiting next video Sanjay

So delightful video! And the comparison with English makes it really easy to perceive information

Still looking forward to the second part! :-)

I love your videos, keep making them ❤

This question is basically equivalent to “why are there so many words in English”. Think about it.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that children in Hong Kong start learning the characters straight away without the aid of pinyin or any other types of phonetic system. Though people start encouraging the use of Jyutping (粵拼) in daily life use

This could be one of the GREATEST language chanels, keep yourself working, I like watching these videos, greetings from Mexico :)

Concise explanation + complicated things made simple = the ease of perception, thumbs up, my friend!

As an Indian who is learning Mandarin Chinese, I found this video really helpful in my Chinese learning

Cool channel bro keep it up

As a native Chinese, I think Chinese is a language for native need to understand every character as an individual like different souls with different feelings and implications then learn how to put them into words naturally(daily life). But I don’t think you need to learn too much because we Chinese people mostly don’t know those because it’s useless but useful for authors write in traditional Chinese style

How Chinese children learn characters is an interesting question, but I’m quite sure that not everyone learns pinyin or zhuyin (a more traditional type of pinyin) first. I myself was able to read characters before learning zhuyin, and I found it annoying reading textbooks in 1st grade, which are all written in zhuyin rather than characters. However, zhuyin still plays a very important role in teaching. Many Chinese characters are so complicated that they have to be written in a certain stroke order. If a student tries to write a character before knowing its stoke order, it often turns out to be unreadable and slow. So many experienced elementary school teachers use zhuyin to “mask” those untaught characters.

This video briefly brushes against topics that engage me more: how do they choose which characters to spell foreign names with? and what is inventing characters like?? I'm so used to Japanese which invented an auxillary alphabet to bypass both of these challenges... my jaw dropped when I saw Oganesson represented by a singular hanzi.

Very interesting...

What a surprise to see a video about Chinese 👍👍👍

3:06 well… same goes to cháng (long) and zhang A in zhang suppose to have a v on top

视频很好，讲的不错👍

Wow, I didn't know that they continue to create more and more characters.

Truly fascinating! I wonder since Chinese is a tonal language (or should I say Chinese languages are tonal, or Mandarin is a tonal language), does it affect estimating the number of syllables in use, or what counts as a homophone?

In Taiwan you must know 4800 full form (standard) characters to be literate. You won't be able to read much knowing only 2500 characters.

1:52 ok it doesn't sound that similar because its probably from cantonese pronunciation "waa4 sing6 deon6" which sounds like wa-sing-ton

I like how you make a point of showing "English has this too". I'm a European and have an interest for Asian languages, and of course hear a lot of "it's so weird, I don't understand how anyone can understand this" comments from people around me. What they don't realize is that their own languages have plenty of similar things happening too. We just never notice when we've known the language since childhood, but in the end, every language is just a communal effort of humans to build a tool of sharing ideas and thoughts. No language would be intentionally "difficult". Once you switch the perspective and start seeing the ways how a language _helps_ the speakers, it all becomes much friendlier.

it interests me why some characters look different and have different meaning, for example 'kou+er' gives a hanzi meaning 'brother', and also there are 2 separate hanzi which are to be used together to form the word 'roach'

Just saying, names like Washington would make more sense if pronounced using older pronunciations or other sinitic languages that do preserve those sounds. Modern Mandarin is a VERY young language and many words would sound quite different a century ago.

Been speak Chinese my whole life but still quite stutter when it comes to writing, if you don't write regularly it's easy to forget how to write certain character.

this question is same as "why are there so many english vocabulary?"

It's nice when you give example words from English with the same linguistic phenomena so people can intuitively understand what exactly you mean

@00:30 ???? One letter, one sound? Have you ever even SEEN English orthography? :)

汉字注重字义轻视发音，各地对同一个字词发音不同，字义大致相同。尤其是文言文，拥有统一书写模式，即使发音不一样。白话文改变模式由单字转换词组，使其简单组合适应更多词汇，更加简单表达更多意思。 中文了解部首与结构，能够大致了解发音与词意，除了专业主持人与AI没有口音，即使你带着很重口音对话，不是单个词组发音，大部分人能够听过大部分意思。

The oxford English dictionary also has more than 200 000 words. It contains so many characters, because it's trying to be unabridged and list all words that have a character associated with them.

Jefferson: 杰佛逊？

The vast huge majority of characters in that dictionary are obsolete or unused, remaining mostly in historical or ancient texts

In mainland China, kids learn Pinyin first, so that mandarin can be taught. China is a large country with many dialect. The only way to teach mandarin at school is to setup a standard of pronunciation first.

More examples of Eng heteronyms: record, red, project

ROC children still use Zhuyin/Bopomofo/Mandarin phonetic symbols with Traditional characters PRC children now use Pinyin with Simplified characters American Chinese children used to learn Traditional Chinese characters and Classical Chinese, with regional pronunciation, in racially segregated schools because they weren't allowed in White schools. They were much better educated in traditional chinese culture than modern counterparts mainly because they stuck to themselves in their own ethnic enclaves, and they really had no choice because the greater society put so many restrictions on them. So, teaching them Chinese was a way for parents to send the kids back to the motherland and find opportunities there... or just a spouse.

The Chinese people don't start learning Chinese by using pinyin... We straight away start by recognizing the characters that are easy and widely used (such as 爸爸 father and 妈妈mother) And then pinyin is introduced in primary school to help children learn the pronunciation of harder words

Chinese has been developing for thousands years from Wenyanwen( a type of writing in ancient China) to modern Chinese(Mandarin) , so the meanings of a character may change or there may be new meanings in the character. Generally, words in Wenyanwen combine 1 character, and 2 in mandarin. For example, “country” is 国家 in mandarin and 国 in Wenyanwen。“although” is 即使/虽然 in mandarin and 虽 in Wenyanwen，“start” is 开始 in mandarin and 始 in Wenyanwen

二維的文字語言，遇到三維的語言文字。

汉字的本质是：词素（8成以上）+单词（1成多）！❗️👍😄 不同时期的比例不同罢了😂

If Pinyin is so simple, taught before characters and even used to type in phones, what keeps the characters alive apart from tradition? Maybe it's the dialects, that people from Shanghai read the characters and pronounce them their own way?

Me as a Hong Kong student, write that much Chinese characters is a piece of cake

Lol oganesson in Chinese - "ow!"

Ohhh now I want that follow-up video where you explain how Chinese characters are made! This is a really good video

Why doing things complicated while you already know you can do it simple?!

I wish these ‘linguists’ would use traditional Chinese aka the PROPER Chinese characters especially when lecturing us about the origins and history of the language. Simplified chinese should only exist in note taking or maybe some in calligraphy (because some simplified characters do originate from 草書 or 行書, but their problem is highly unrecognisable to the general public, since almost each writer/calligrapher could and had different iteration of them)

There are so many Chinese characters, but it's still better than so many vocabularies in English

Compared with the number of words in English, there are way fewer characters in Chinese. Average native speakers masters about 4000 characters, while you need to master about 20,000 words to reach the level of native English speakers. The memory burden of Chinese is way lower.

As a chinese person sometimes i wonder about some chinese words, such as the word for cucumber, 黄瓜. 黄 means yellow, although cucumbers are not yellow.

Your last point is wrong. Actually, no new Chinese characters have been created for a thousand year, except for a little new chemical elements found in the last century, which also happens in other languages including English.

The whole number of Hanzi (Chinese characters) is more than 100 thousands. But for most Chinese people and Chinese learner, 3,500 common characters are enough to cover 99% situation.

can one navigate in china knowing only pinyin?

The word "kit' has 3 letters, I can see and count that. But it has 3 sounds??? WTF!!! I hear only one sound!!!

PINYIN MEANS CHINESE PHONICS. IT IS THE COPY OF THE WESTERN PHONICS WRITING IN THE 20 CENTURY

When calculating the number of possible syllables in Chinese, were the tones taken into account? A syllable with the same consonant/vowel combination can be pronounced using 4 different tones in Mandarin which effectively quadruples the syllable count.

AS A CHINESE, I DO NOT KNOW PINYIN

WHY THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY ARE SO MANY ?

此木为柴山山出 因火成烟夕夕多 这个对联多少可以管窥中華文字之精妙。

九and酒are homophones in Mandarin but not in some other dialects. Most importantly they were not homophonous when characters were coined. 九 ”nine” belongs to the velar series and began with a *k- in Old Chinese; 酒 ”wine” was either an affricate or a liquid depending on which authority you ask.

A total nightmare

At its origin, each Chinese character is a word. Each character has its own meaning. Nowadays, things have change and mandarin has a lot of two syllable words. But that’s not always the case for other Chinese dialects. You can compare each Chinese character to each English word. Learning Chinese character is like learning English vocabulary. What Chinese doesn’t require is learning an alphabet on top of learning the vocabulary. I think Chinese therefore should be easier.

From Bangladesh 🇧🇩

I have the Chinese KJV Bible app on my Samsung cellphone, yeah I don't know how many Chinese character it has but anyway it's the King James Bible in Chinese instead of English.

i am glad that i am using chinese words everyday XD ( I AM A HONGKONGESE )

HELL NAWWWW

AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 CHINESE CHARACTERS BUT THAT IS ENOUGH

Traditional Chinese has more words. Simplified Chinese has been cut down a lot.

你的视频真的是太棒了！

We Taiwanese use ㄅㄆㄇnot only PRC people use han words

Don't explain the large number of characters.

It is not at all helpful to relegate chinese characters to being just homophonic syllables. Instead the closest analogue to Chinese characters in English would be Latin roots. A character may appear in many words, and by doing so it colors the words all in roughly the same way. Thus "Telephone", "TV", "Film", and "Computer" all have the "electricity/lightning" character in them, as they're all historically "electric" things. Just as one or more Latin roots may appear in many English words, and color them as well.

Homophones can have another meaning.

Tells you about the Chinese! Sanskrit has alphabets which are phonetically pronounced and easy to write. No need to draw pictures and then figure out what the pictures mean! LOL!

Most chinese characters are like $¥€¢£% they are symbol of meaning, and english depend a lot on such symbols

I’ve spent about 100,000 hours studying English humor and Western culture, and about 100,000 hours studying Chinese culture. My native language is Chinese. I teach Chinese in humorous way and with cute pictures. Hope my videos can reach those who want to learn Chinese. Sorry to take your space.

THE CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE HARD TO LEARN ? NO, I DON'T THINK SO

Mandarin Chadnese

獨立語、曲折語、黏著語。

Chinese children don't learn with pinyin.

One thing wrong is that not only is each character a syllable, it is also a word. Chinese words are monosyllabic.

I didn’t know it was possible to create new characters

I think it was originally meant as a secret way of communicating between rulers and just later became what everyone was using.

f(nova）日々輝学園

Such a good explanation however English comes from ENGLAND not the USA. Wrong flag. Ping Ying is so un-phonetic ! For an English speaker trying to read it is so frustrating with letters not representing the basic phonetic sounds of the letters. English isn't much better with so many variations so I suppose it's almost as difficult for a Chinese person to learn English.

Why are there so many words in English? It's the same thing. When you read an English word, you don't go letter-by-letter, you memorise the entire word instead. Thousands of them. Chinese characters are also composed from a small set of "atoms" (called radicals), I'm no expert but I think there are bout 50 of them. And you simply learn the characters just like you learn the English words.

I've always wondered why Chinese speakers don't just switch to something much easier like the Latin alphabet since they have to study that also...!!!

The dialectics of the 17th century philosopher Sum Dum Fuk explains it well. It makes for interesting reading.

80% of this video is misleading

Pinyin is just a recent invention by the current Chinese govt. I wonder if it was invented for the sake of foreigners or the computer age. You used their newly created simplified characters which is not authentic Chinese, sadly to say. There are also dozens of dialects and Chinese people from different regions cannot understand each other ! 😂😂😂

I don't understand why China and Japan (and other countries) use nonsensical old writing systems that force people to learn unnecessary things and make their lives more complicated. This is partly true for English as well. In a proper system, a person only needs to know how to pronounce a word whose meaning they don't know to be able to write it, and vice versa. Languages evolve, but writing systems have been in most languages with minimal changes for several centuries...

According to your infographic the English language is.....American? WTF? The United States of America make up just one of the countries with English speakers around the world. But it's origin is still England.

Why are there so many Chinese characters? Simply because they refuse to develop a decent real alphabet like other languages. They are too proud of their logographic writing system, so they are and will be stuck forever in the stage of ancient civilizations (think of Egyptian hieroglyphs). This applies to Japanese as well, and their problem is much worse.

Chinese language should be deleted