Chinese language
Chinese characters

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categories: pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds, and derivative characters. Only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as 人 (rén; ' human '), 日 (rì; ' Sun '), 山 (shān; ' mountain '), and 水 (shuǐ; ' water '). Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as 沖 (chōng; ' pour '), combining a phonetic component 中 (zhōng) with a semantic component of the radical 氵, a reduced form of 水; ' water '. Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary classified characters under a now-common set of 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. Traditional characters, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and many overseas Chinese-speaking communities, largely take their form from received character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty and standardized during the Ming. Simplified characters, introduced by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, especially by adopting common cursive shorthand variants and merging characters with similar pronunciations to the one with the least strokes, among other methods. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters—first by creating its own simplified characters, then by adopting entirely the PRC simplified characters. It has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a mainland newspaper. The PRC defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. A large unabridged dictionary like the Kangxi dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
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