Are you interested in your child learning Chinese? Just like any other language, an important part of their learning journey is developing the skills to read and write. However, reading and writing in Chinese is very different than in English or the romance languages you may be familiar with. But it isn’t impossible. We’ve developed this short introduction to the Chinese alphabet to get you and your child started on their language journey. They’ll be reading and writing in no time.

The short answer: Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet. So how do Chinese people read without one? It’s actually very simple. They arrange their words differently.

In English, words are comprised of letters that are phonetic. Each letter has a sound, and the letters are arranged together to make words. You know what a word is by sounding out the letters. Chinese is completely different. Instead of an alphabet, words in Chinese are comprised of characters, or symbols.

Characters are not the same as letters. Characters are logograms, or symbols, that have meaning — think back to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Instead of representing a sound, characters are pictographic and ideographic. For characters that are pictographic, the character is a picture-like illustration of its meaning. For characters that are ideographic, the character is an abstract representation of its meaning.

Each word can be comprised of one character, two characters, three characters, or more — and there are over 80,000 characters in Chinese! Don’t let that overwhelm you — a fluent speaker only needs to know around 2,000 characters.

One of the most distinct differences between Chinese and English is that none of these characters have an exact sound attached to them. In English, the letter ‘b’ is pronounced /b/. In Chinese, each character has a meaning — but no sound. So, you could even read Chinese without knowing how to speak it. It’s helpful since not all Chinese people speak Mandarin Chinese, the official language of China. Despite language differences across China and the Chinese diaspora, characters serve as a unifier. If you can read in Chinese, you can communicate despite spoken language barriers.

At first glance, characters might look like a complicated drawing. Luckily, you don’t need to be an artist to write Chinese characters. Chinese characters are composed of two parts: it’s the radical and its phonetic component. Radicals make the base component of any character, and every character has one. They are typically on the outermost left-hand side of the character but can be found at the top or bottom of a character as well. The phonetic component gives you a clue to how the character may be pronounced, but isn’t an exact science.

Here are some examples below:

There are over 200 radicals, but only about 30 radicals are commonly used. When you learn these commonly used radicals, it will help you easily remember and write Chinese characters.

So how do you write a character? You write using strokes, which are the lines that make up a single character. Strokes can be horizontal or vertical.

When you learn how to write each character, you can look up its stroke order — essentially, the way you should write the character. This is like the order you learned to write each line for a single letter in English. Remember those up and down arrows when you traced each letter in kindergarten? Chinese has something very similar.

While you do need to memorize each character to learn it, over time, you will simply follow four simple rules to understand how to write each new character you learn. Trust us, you won’t need to look up the stroke order for each new character you learn.

Rule #1: Characters are written from top to bottom, left to right.

Rule #2: Horizontal strokes are written from left to right.

Rule #3: Vertical strokes are written from top to bottom.

Rule #4: Enclosed characters are characters that have a square or rectangular outer portion. Some examples of enclosed characters include: 国、回、日

These characters are written with the enclosure first.

If you are learning Chinese, then you have heard about pinyin. Pinyin is a Chinese alphabet system that helps learners understand how to pronounce Mandarin Chinese characters. It transcribes characters using English letters, so that I's easier for learners to learn Mandarin.

Why is pinyin important? Since Chinese characters aren’t phonetic, when you learn a new character, pinyin helps you learn how to pronounce the character in Chinese.

We’ve included a handy pronunciation chart to help you understand how to pronounce each letter in the pinyin alphabet.

Want to learn more about pinyin? LingoAce has an in-depth guide to pinyin here.

How do you read Chinese letters?

With thousands of Chinese characters, you’re probably wondering how anyone learns how to read Chinese. The short answer: memorization. It’s important to memorize the characters for each new word you learn, just like you learned to spell when you were in school.

Using the breakdown of the character structure and flashcards are a great way to get you started. In the end, learning to read in Chinese isn’t difficult — it’s just different. In fact, here are 4 reasons why learning Chinese isn’t as hard as you think.

Want your child to learn even more Chinese? LingoAce is one of the best ways to learn Chinese for kids. Our classes are tailored to meet your child’s learning needs. 

Experience a redefined Chinese learning experience first-hand and book a free trial class with us today.