Mandarin grammar: Characters

Unlike the English language, which uses the Roman alphabet, Mandarin does not have an alphabet.

Instead there are Mandarin characters, called 汉字hàn zì, and each character represents a word.

Each Mandarin character is made from different components.

There are usually two components to a character:

Radical - The component that shows the overall meaning of the character, is called the radical.

For example, in the character 妈mǎ meaning ‘mother’ the radical is 女nǚ (woman) because of the connection often made between mothers and women.

Phonetic - The other part of the character is called the phonetic (pronunciation).

In the ancient form of the language this showed how the character was pronounced and in modern Mandarin it can give you a clue about the pronunciation, eg the 马mǎ (horse) in 妈mā (mother).

It is important to remember that the phonetic is only a clue, not an accurate guide.

For example, in the character 看kàn (to look at), the radical is 目mù (eye), which helps with the meaning, but the phonetic 手shǒu (hand) does not give any guide to pronunciation.

Also, sometimes the radical is the whole character, like in 马mǎ (horse), so there is no phonetic.

Mandarin characters do not tell you how to pronounce them – that’s what pinyin is for.

Mandarin characters started out more like ‘pictures’ but have changed over 4,000 years into the Mandarin characters used today.

This can be seen clearly in the development of the character for ‘mountain’ (山shān):

The smallest units of Mandarin characters are strokes.