12 not so obvious facts about Chinese

Today we take a look at what we call “Chinese” when we speak English in Taiwan : Mandarin.

I hope this article can help you feel more comfortable with some confusing aspects of Chinese. I’m not a linguist or a teacher so feel free to correct me.

This article will be a good intro if you’ve never studied Chinese but it could help someone who’s been learning a while too.

Chinese is not a language

Chinese is not actually a language but a language family. This article is mainly about Mandarin’s written form in Taiwan : traditional Chinese. A lot of Taiwanese people also speak Hoklo, Hakka or an aboriginal language. In the PRC the official language is also Mandarin and a lot of Chinese people also speak a local language. Mandarin itself is originally a dialect of Chinese from Beijing.

A character is not (always) a word

What do characters stand for ? Chinese uses a character per syllable. Chinese has a low syllable per word ratio. Most words in Chinese have one or two syllables, some have more. In the instance of a monosyllabic word (for example “貓”, cat) the character will be recognize as a word. But in the instance of a word with 2 syllables (for example “蘿蔔”, radish) it’s not at all obvious that a Chinese speaker will know what both character means when taken independently.

Characters are made up of recurring parts that are not always words by themselves

You have simple characters like “木” (wood) and then you combine those to form more complicated characters like “林” (forest, “木” twice) or “焚” (to burn, “木” twice above “火” : fire).

But just like a character isn’t a word, sometime a part of a character isn’t a character.

For example we used “廴 “to form” 建” (to build) but “廴” on its own doesn’t mean anything.

There’s no alphabetical order

One part of a character is the radical, after learning a few words it’s easier to identify the radical as they occur often. Since there is no alphabetical order chinese dictionaries rely on other methods to sort the words, including sorting by radicals, by number of strokes or by pronunciation.

We don’t know how many characters there are

It’s impossible to know because like in any language new words are created all the time while we stop using older words. But there are less characters than words since many words are made using 2 characters. Anyway the total number of characters is estimated at around 10,000 with a literate Chinese speaker recognizing around 4,000 to 6,000.

There are no capital letters in Chinese

As you know Chinese is traditionally written in columns and read from right to left and from the top to the bottom. A full stop, written like this “。”indicate the end of a sentence but capitalisation doesn’t exist. Nowadays, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, some material features Chinese written from left to right like western texts.

Mandarin became the official language in 1945

Some older Taiwanese people who were schooled before that date may only speak Hoklo (Hokkien) or Hakka. Most Taiwanese people are bilingual speaking Mandarin and Hoklo, Hakka or an aboriginal language.

Taiwan uses traditional chinese

When The PRC decided to evolve written Chinese and simplify it to promote literacy in the 50s, Taiwan unsurprisingly didn’t follow. Simplified Chinese uses less strokes but there’s still a debate over whether it’s easier to learn. Calligraphers from the PRC still use traditional Chinese. If you know traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese will be easier to learn for you.

Proper names are not always written in Pinyin

It took a while for everybody to agree on the method of romanization of Chinese. In 2009 Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as the official transcription method, Hanyu Pinyin is also used in the PRC. Of course proper names (places and people) were adapted before that so for example the surname 張 is famously romanized Chang while in your Chinese book it would read Zhāng. Similarly for 臺北, we write Taipei not Taibei or Táiběi.

Taiwanese people don’t usually know pinyin

Taiwanese use a phonetic alphabet called Bopomofo or Zhuyin. It contains 37 characters with which you can write all the sounds available in Chinese. It looks like this : “ㄅㄆㄇㄈㄉㄊㄋㄌㄍㄎㄏㄐㄑㄒㄓㄔㄕㄖㄗㄘㄙ”.

Hong Kong and Macau use traditional chinese too

People from Macau and Hong Kong learn Mandarin at school as it is the official language but they study and use Cantonese too. Cantonese is written using traditional characters that can be found in written Mandarin as well as characters only used to write Cantonese.

Chinese speaker pronounce Japanese Kanji in Chinese

Japanese people use traditional Chinese characters for proper nouns and call those characters “Kanji”. But they use different pronunciations. When Chinese speakers talk about a Japanese person or place, they use the Chinese pronunciation of the character. So for example Tokyo is written “東京” both in Japanese and Chinese but whereas Japanese people pronounce it “Tokyo”, Chinese speakers pronounce it “Dōngjīng”. That’s why if you’re trying to talk about Hirokazu Kore-eda or Takeshi Kitano with a Taiwanese friend they might not know who you’re referring to.

That’s it for what I know about Chinese in Taiwan. Taipei Twelve publishes articles every 12th of the month. Check out our other articles and be on the lookout for new ones.