A report on Chinese characters, Simplified Chinese characters and Radical (Chinese characters)

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters

The first batch of Simplified Characters introduced in 1935, later retracted in 1936, consisted of 324 characters.

In the traditional Chinese character 媽 mā "mother". The left part is the radical 女 nǚ "female". The character is the semantic component of a phono-semantic compound (}, and the right part, 馬 mǎ "horse", is the phonetic component.

Comparative evolution from pictograms to abstract shapes, in cuneiform, Egyptian and Chinese characters

The slogan 战无不胜的毛泽东思想万岁! (Zhàn wúbù shèng de Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng wànsuì!; Long live the invincible Mao Zedong Thought!), in simplified script, on Xinhua Gate in Beijing.

The Shi Qiang pan, a bronze ritual basin dated to around 900 BC. Long inscriptions on the surface describe the deeds and virtues of the first seven Zhou kings.

A page from a Song dynasty publication in a regular script typeface which resembles the handwriting of Ouyang Xun from Tang Dynasty

The first batch of Simplified Characters introduced in 1935 consisted of 324 characters.

Current (dark green) and former extension (light green) of the use of Chinese characters

The first two lines of the classic Vietnamese epic poem The Tale of Kieu, written in the Nôm script and the modern Vietnamese alphabet. Chinese characters representing Sino-Vietnamese words are shown in green, characters borrowed for similar-sounding native Vietnamese words in purple, and invented characters in brown.

Mongolian text from The Secret History of the Mongols in Chinese transcription, with a glossary on the right of each row

Sample of the cursive script by Chinese Tang dynasty calligrapher Sun Guoting, c. 650 AD

Chinese calligraphy of mixed styles written by Song dynasty (1051–1108 AD) poet Mifu. For centuries, the Chinese literati were expected to master the art of calligraphy.

The first four characters of Thousand Character Classic in different type and script styles. From right to left: seal script, clerical script, regular script, Ming and sans-serif.

Variants of the Chinese character for guī 'turtle', collected c. 1800 from printed sources. The one at left is the traditional form used today in Taiwan and Hong Kong,, though may look slightly different, or even like the second variant from the left, depending on your font (see Wiktionary). The modern simplified forms used in China,, and in Japan, 亀, are most similar to the variant in the middle of the bottom row, though neither is identical. A few more closely resemble the modern simplified form of the character for diàn 'lightning', 电.

Five of the 30 variant characters found in the preface of the Imperial (Kangxi) Dictionary which are not found in the dictionary itself. They are 為 (爲) wèi "due to", 此 cǐ "this", 所 suǒ "place", 能 néng "be able to", 兼 jiān "concurrently". (Although the form of 為 is not very different, and in fact is used today in Japan, the radical 爪 has been obliterated.) Another variant from the preface, 来 for 來 lái "to come", also not listed in the dictionary, has been adopted as the standard in Mainland China and Japan.

The character 次 in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. If you have an appropriate font installed, you can see the corresponding character in Vietnamese:.

Cumulative frequency of simplified Chinese characters in Modern Chinese text

Kanji for 剣道 (Kendo), pronounced differently from the Korean term 劍道 (Kumdo), or the Chinese words 劍道 (jiàndào; it is more common to use the expressions 劍術 jiànshù or 劍法 jiànfǎ in Chinese).

Taito, "the appearance of a dragon in flight"

Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters used in Mainland China and Singapore, as prescribed by the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters.

- Simplified Chinese characters

A Chinese radical or indexing component is a graphical component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary.

- Radical (Chinese characters)

Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in China, the kanji used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese simplified characters in several respects.

- Chinese characters

That is, pictograms extended from literal objects to take on symbolic or metaphoric meanings; sometimes even displacing the use of the character as a literal term, or creating ambiguity, which was resolved though character determinants, more commonly but less accurately known as "radicals" i.e. concept keys in the phono-semantic characters.

- Chinese characters

The character simplification adopted in the People's Republic of China and elsewhere has modified a number of components, including those used as radicals.

- Radical (Chinese characters)

The "Complete List of Simplified Characters" employs character components, not the traditional definition of radicals. A component refers to any conceivable part of a character, regardless of its position within the character, or its relative size compared to other components in the same character. For instance, in the character 摆, not only is 扌 (a traditional radical) considered a component, but so is 罢.

- Simplified Chinese characters

2 related topics with Alpha

Traditional Chinese characters

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The character {{lang|zh|{{linktext|繁}}}} (Pinyin: {{transl|zh|fán}}) meaning "complex, complicated (Chinese characters)"

Countries and regions officially using Chinese characters currently or formerly as a writing system:Traditional Chinese used officially (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau)
Simplified Chinese used officially but traditional form is also used in publishing (Singapore and Malaysia)
Simplified Chinese used officially, traditional form in daily use is uncommon (China, Kokang and Wa State of Myanmar)
Chinese characters used in parallel with other scripts in respective native languages (South Korea, Japan)Chinese characters were once used officially, but this is now obsolete (Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam)

Traditional Chinese characters are one type of standard Chinese character sets of the contemporary written Chinese.

In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore in official publications.

There are still many Unicode characters that cannot be written using most IMEs, one example being the character used in the Shanghainese dialect instead of, which is U+20C8E ( with a radical).