The importance of learning Chinese characters

Anyone who decides to study Chinese has a tendency, at least at the beginning, to focus on the phonetic transcription, known as pinyin, rather than on the characters themselves. This is quite understandable given the struggling a beginner encounters in trying to associate each character to its sound.

However, it is important to try to manage without the pinyin as soon as possible and understand that characters are essential in a language like Chinese.

Some would think: “If there is a phonetic transcription of the characters, why don’t they use latin letters and give up those unintelligible hieroglyphics?”

This is not possible: first of all because the characters are precisely what makes Chinese so special; secondly, Chinese language has a limited numer of syllables, approximately 400. This means that it’s possible to bump into words whose pronunciation consists of exactly the same syllables. Part of the problem is solved by the tones (I will talk about this topic on the next lesson), that distinguish a sound from another; but there are also words that, in addition to being formed by the same syllables, are also pronounced with exactly the same tone. Hence, chinese characters become useful to understand which word we refer to.

For example, the syllable shi corresponds to about ten characters for each tone. As you can see in the picture below, there are words which are pronounced exactly in the same way and with the same tone (represented by the symbol ˋ), but both from a visual and a semantic point of view they prove to be completely different.

Therefore, it is very important, for those who are planning to learn Chinese well, to figure out that pinyin itself is not enough to understand the profoundness of this language. The phonetic transcription must only be an initial aid.

Cover photo by Wang Xi