By Alan W — Last updated Februrary 4, 2020
Chinese Characters, also called "Sinographs", "Han Ideograms", and all sorts of other things (not to mention kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean...) are boxy-shaped things, written for many hundreds of years using brush and ink. In recent times, they have been immortalized in standards like Unicode, ensuring they will remain with humanity for the foreseeable Internet. Let's dive in!
For the most part in this article, I will discuss Chinese characters in the context of Chinese ("Mandarin"), but the analysis and discussion presented here can readily be extended to Japanese kanji as well, desu.
What does a Chinese character mean? Chinese characters typically have some fuzzy meanings associated with them, and many can function as stand-alone words, but usually they are used as parts of compounds of multiple characters (often 2-4). For example, one might say 人 has the meaning "person". The meanings of some words follow in a more-or-less straight forward way:
However, nice patterns like this quickly break down when discussing characters associated with more abstract meanings. Characters can have may mean quite different things in different words. The meanings of many words are not compositional in that you cannot deduce the meaning of a word from its parts. You must memorize the meaning of a whole word.
For example, consider the character 上 shàng, which is very common. You can see this in many words/phrases like:
So while in many cases, Chinese characters are associated with some relatively easy to pin down meaning, in other cases, asking what a Chinese character means is like asking what "the letter c" means; there isn't a really good answer besides that it is a glyph (symbol) used to write a language.
For historical reasons, Chinese characters are often associated with multiple pronunciations each. Learning to read Chinese means learning to read characters in the context of words they appear.
To extend the example given earlier, this is like saying "how do you pronounce the letter c in English?" The annoying, but true answer is that "it depends..."
Some rabid Chinese chararcter loving traditionalists might tell you something like "learning Chinese to read Chinese characters is easy, you just look at such-and-such radical and you can guess correctly most of the time" (a radical is a discrete, identifiable part of a Chinese character). It is true that the form of chracters may give hints about how a character may be pronounced. However, one cannot systematically derive pronunciations from graphical forms in Chinese in this way.
Languages like Korean and Vietnamese have largely done away with Chinese characters. However, these languages have relatively more complex sound systems (phonologies in linguo jargon) than Chinese ("Mandarin"). Likewise, they (here I mainly know Korean) make less referenes to literary Chinese this-and-that in contemporary times, which makes ditching Chinese characters much more feasible.
My impression is that Chinese cannot be written without Chinese characters without drastically changing the language itself. By this I mean, (1) avoiding literary/classical idioms, (2) selecting against ambiguous vocabulary, (3) choosing non-character sources to create new vocabulary (e.g. English, Russian), (4) not referring to Chinese characters in speech and writing...
Nowadays, typing Chinese is not so difficult. See "Chinese Input Methods" (Xah Lee 2017) for an overview (with pics).
One thing that continues to bother me about Chinese characters is that although modern input systems are fast and convenient, they are often cloud based. That means that when typing languages like Chinese and Japanese you are often uploading tons of data (N-grams) to Google and the like to harvest and analyze. In alphabetic languages, like English, you are at least getting a more or less direct key press to output experience. Typing Chinese Characters is like routing everything through another layer of abstraction, as is done on smart phones.
Chinese dictionaries are nowadays most often organized by pronunciation. Characters are arranged according to their most common pronunciation, in the order of the Pīnyīn (standard Romanization) alphabet. Once you are already familiar with at least one pronunciation of a character, this is probably the fastest lookup method.
However, when looking up characters for the first time, a more involved procedur is needed. In most look-up systems you will have to:
Unlike dinosaurs, Chinese characters haven't died out.