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 syllable. Most words have one, two or three characters.

Each Mandarin character is made from different components.

There are usually two components to a character:

• a radical
• a phonetic

Let's look at both of these in the character 妈 mā (mother):

Radical

The radical gives you a clue to the character's meaning.

For example, in the character 妈 mā 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 sometimes give you a clue about the pronunciation, for example 马 mǎ (horse) in 妈 mā (mother).

Warning! 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 component.

To know how to pronounce a character you'll need to know its pinyin.

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.

Click below to download a template for practicing how to write Mandarin characters