It is common to think that Chinese and English are simply different languages that can say the same things. However, the differences between Chinese and English are much deeper than that. There are extremely fundamental differences in the way that speakers of these languages view and organize the world.
Language at its most fundamental level is primarily a tool that enables human beings to represent, internalize, manipulate, and communicate their awareness of relationships that exist in nature. According to modern physics, the structure of nature is composed of only 2 components, space and time. Language is a tool that enables humans to maintain and express their understandings of relationships that exist in space and time. Just as there is nothing else to nature than space and time, there is nothing else to language than representation of relationships in space and time that speakers are aware of.
Different cultures have greater or lesser differences in their relationships to nature, and so the grammars of different languages organize their awareness of relationships that exist in space and time more or less differently. In some cases, these differences can be extreme. The grammars of Chinese and English are not at completely opposite extremes, but they are extremely far apart in how they represent the structure of space and time.
The grammar of the Chinese language represents an organization of space and time that is much more oriented toward space than time. The Chinese grammar is maximally oriented toward space, and minimally oriented toward time. The grammar of English, on the other hand, is much more oriented toward time than space.
For example, English, with its much greater orientation toward time, has far more verb tenses than Chinese. Chinese, with its minimal orientation toward time, only expresses a single tense in the form of the verb, the present tense. In other words, verbs in Chinese do not change to express the past or future tense, etc.
Another example of this difference in orientation to time or space is the writing system, which concerns us here. English orients more to time than to space. English words are written using collections of letters, the letters of the alphabet. Each letter, more or less, represents one sound. Sounds are combined to form syllables. Words in English can be composed of a very large number of syllables. It takes time to work our way through the sounds of a word in order to read the word and understand it. If we were to stop reading in the middle of a word, stop the flow of sounds, the word would not have meaning.
Chinese words are different. Chinese words reflect a greater orientation to space. Chinese words are written using what are known as ‘characters’. These characters represent pictures. Pictures do not require time to read, to work through one piece at a time, where each piece is dependent on sound. Pictures are observed holistically, all at once. If we look at a picture, we can see all at once what it is a picture of, rather than looking at it a piece at a time as with English. All Chinese words are composed of a single syllable.
Chinese characters were originally pictures of the concepts that they represent. These original pictures did not represent sounds at all. Any given character can have a large number of pronunciations, depending on the language in which a character is pronounced. Within China proper, there are many different Chinese languages, each of which pronounces a given character in its own way. Since the meaning is not tied to the sound, but only to the meaning within the picture, for the most part all speakers of Chinese can share a similar writing system.
Now, thousands of years since the development of Chinese characters, with the increasing level of abstraction of words, not all characters are based on simple pictographs, such that it is not always possible to clearly identify the pictures within characters. Still, it is certainly possible to do so for hundreds upon hundreds of characters.
If you can learn to recognize the pictures within the pictographs, then you can much more easily understand the meaning of characters, remember how the characters are written, and recognize the cultural insights that they convey.
It is much easier, much more fun, and much more meaningful to learn, understand, and remember Chinese characters when we understand and recognize the pictures upon which they are based. We will explore some deep insights into Chinese culture that make it possible to understand the pictures used in pictographs, we will explore a number of powerful techniques for understanding these pictures, and we will examine numerous Chinese characters here.
Some people, usually non-Chinese speakers, have wondered why Chinese speakers don’t just do away with characters and adopt an alphabet. 26 or so letters surely would be simpler for all than having to learn thousands of characters.
However, it is not that easy. English has a relatively large number of syllables, and numerous syllables can be combined to construct a word. Still, sometimes there are problems in English.
For example, consider the words present and present. One of these represents a noun, a synonym of gift, and the other represents a verb, a synonym of introduce.
Chinese, however, has relatively very few distinct syllables, and each word is composed of a single syllable. In Chinese, however, there are far, far more homonyms. For example, the sound that we spell in English shi has some 50-60 meanings in Chinese, and this only includes the most commonly used meanings in Chinese. For example, this sound represents the Chinese equivalents to the English words poem, lion, the number 10, history, recognize, and on and on.
Chinese words adopt tones in an attempt to increase the number of distinctions available to the language, given the reduced number of sounds. Mandarin Chinese has 4 tones. Other Chinese languages have several more.
Furthermore, if we were to use an alphabet, for most people in the southern half of China, the word for 4 and the word for 10 would be written the same. Even when spoken, 4 and 10 can be difficult for many to distinguish. No, characters are very important in Chinese to enable clear and easy distinction of meaning.
Chinese characters are units of meaning, anyway, and are not units of sound. A given character can be pronounced in at least 2 dozen ways, depending on the native language and place of origin of the speaker.