Cang Jie, The Inventor of Chinese Characters!
Cang Jie is a legendary figure in Chinese history. Chinese children know Cang Jie as the Chinese characters’ creator 倉頡造字|仓颉造字. During the time of the Yellow Emperor at around 2500 B.C.) Chinese people were using knots and stones to record their lives. It was not an efficient way to document events. Yellow Emperor ordered the historian, Cang Jie to find a better way to keep a record of all significant events. Cang Jie started his journey to the creation of Chinese characters.
Cang Jie, The Inventor of Chinese Characters! Was it easy to create the first Chinese characters? How was Cang inspired by what he observed, what he encountered, and whom he talked to? What did the first Chinese characters look like? Children will follow the adventure in this book and learn the history and story behind the creation of Chinese characters.
Children will see some Chinese characters that look like pictures. These are the Chinese characters in the pictogram group. Can you think of any other writing system that has words like pictures? How about Egyptian hieroglyphs that were used in Ancient Egypt?
How many Chinese characters are there?
There are 10,516 Chinese character entries in Shuōwén Jiězì 說文解字, the first Chinese character dictionary using radicals (bùshǒu 部首) for organization. Xu Shem 許慎, a scholar wrote Shuōwén Jiězì 說文解字 in Han dynasty, the 2nd imperial dynasty in China (206 BC–220 AD). *Chinese radicals are similar to roots in Romance languages.
How many Chinese words are there? There are 47,035 Chinese character entries in the Kangxi Dictionary 康熙字典. It is the first standard national Chinese dictionary named after an emperor, Emperor Kangxi. Kangxi was an emperor of the Qing Dynasty 清朝 (1644 – 1912). Emperor Kangxi ordered the creation of this dictionary. Its compiling process began in 1710 and was completed in 1716.
First Mandarin Sounds: An Awesome Chinese Word Book • Traditional Chinese version • Simplified Chinese version
When you look at the numbers above you might be surprised.
But, what you need to know is if you know the 800 most commonly used Chinese characters you can understand about 85% of the Chinese language.
Formation of Chinese Characters
From the story of Cang Jie, The Inventor of Chinese Characters children can further explore the six groups of Chinese character formation.
There are six groups! Do you know there is more than just pictograms in Chinese? Pictogram 象形 is only one of the six categories. There are about 500 Chinese characters in the pictogram group. The other five groups are Symbols 指示, Meaning-Meaning compound characters 會意|会意, Sound-Meaning compound characters 形聲|形声, Derived characters 轉注|转注, and borrowed characters 假借.
You will be very happy to learn about an important and crucial element in Chinese characters’ structure and that is the radicals. Radicals are similar to the roots in Romance languages. There are a total of 214 radicals (roots) and about one-third of them are high-frequency ones. The high-frequency radicals constitute about 8,000 Chinese characters alone.
Examples of Chinese characters in the pictogram group
Two Chinese Writing Systems
There are two Chinese writing systems: Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and many international Chinese communities use traditional Chinese. Macau, Singapore, and China use simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are the foundation of Chinese writing. That is where Cang Jie started at. Simplified Chinese characters are formed based on traditional Chinese characters and some are transformed from classic Chinese cursive calligraphy styles. The simplification process of Chinese characters started in Mainland China in the 1950s. Simplified Chinese characters have fewer strokes and it was intended to increase the literate rate at the time. Educated Chinese people in China and in Taiwan can easily read both writing systems.
Teaching Resource
Interested in teaching 30 Basic Chinese characters in a fun and playful way? Miss Panda has premium teaching resources that can assist you in guiding your children to read, play, and learn the first Chinese characters – First 30 Chinese Character series: Set 1 and Set 2. It is important to know that each Chinese character is carefully selected and combined. With that, the learning process is meaningful to learners and they can connect two or three to form a phrase.
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Available in Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese editions.
Wow! That is very fascinating! Thank you for sharing this.
There are so many interesting facts about Chinese language that people usually don’t hear. I will have more about the formation of Chinese characters coming. Thank you so much for visiting! -Miss Panda