“Turtle”: The Picture inside the Chinese Character
Pictograph: Where the fun and beauty of this language lies
First of all, I have to admit that even though my mother tongue is Chinese Mandarin, I still find it a difficult language to learn.
Let’s start with a Chinese character I learned when I was in elementary school 20 years ago.
There are 6 methods of forming the Chinese characters, and the most basic and ancient one is the pictograph (「象形」).
The most interesting pictograph character, and probably the one school children hate the most, is “turtle” (「龜」).
This character has a special place in the development of Chinese characters. In the past, our ancestors inscribed characters onto turtle plastrons during divination. When archeologists discovered these turtle plastrons, they named the characters on the plastrons “oracle bone script” (「甲骨文」). It was the oldest Chinese writing recognized to date.
This picture shows how the character evolved (in order from youngest to oldest):
And below is the character we use today:
I remember that as a child, we sometimes complained to our parents and teachers that certain characters were too complex to write (by the way, it is common that schoolchildren complain about writing their own names).
The character “turtle” is probably the first most “unfriendly character” Chinese-speaking children learn at school. After all, it doesn’t make sense that a small turtle takes so many strokes to write! Even bigger animals like elephants (「象」) and horses (「馬」) are so much friendlier to write.
But we soon grew up only to find that this is not the most difficult part of learning Chinese Mandarin — in fact, this is the easy part.
Chinese characters are logograms, and each of them has its own sound and meaning.
When you combine several characters, they become “vocabulary” and “idioms” with a new meaning, and sometimes, with a story behind it — which we have to study for exams (I’m not complaining though; many stories are quite interesting!). A vocabulary (「詞彙」) typically consists of 2 characters; an idiom (「成語」) typically consists of 4 characters.
An elementary student in Taiwan learns a total of 3,000 characters at school, which is enough for everyday use.
In the next article, I would like to share how our schoolchildren learn to “correctly” write Chinese characters — stroke by stroke!
Bis bald!
Hi readers! I am a new writer on Medium, posting articles about my country Taiwan and Chinese Mandarin. Follow me on Medium if you are interested for more related articles. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Here I write to share the fun inside Chinese language, but if you want to ask about learning Chinese, I’d be glad to answer as well!
