What I Love About Chinese Characters

Chinese characters (汉字/漢字) are absolutely the feature of the Chinese language that's most famous in the Western world. Even if you know nothing else about the language, you've seen the characters written out on a product you've bought, in a Chinese restaurant, or in any piece of media set somewhere Chinese is used.

It makes sense that this would be the case. Humans tend to notice things based on contrast from their standard, and people whose native language uses phonograms (characters which represent sounds; ie. the English alphabet) are naturally going to see logograms (characters which represent meaning; ie. Chinese characters) as different and difficult to comprehend.

Whenever I mention that I study Chinese to someone for the first time, they always comment about the difficulty of the language, and they almost always reference the characters. If not characters, they mention tones, which is another interesting feature of the language, but that's a topic for another day.

It is true that learning to read, type, and write in Chinese characters is an added challenge for Chinese learners who are used to languages that use phonograms, but I also think that the prevailing idea that reading characters is simply more difficult than reading a phonographic alphabet is false.

Practical Benefits

To illustrate my point, I'll start with an example. During a Chinese class, I was watching a video in Chinese. It was an interview with a Taiwanese Indigenous person talking about the Taiwanese government's educational programs for indigenous people, and how the original goal for these programs was to make the indigenous groups assimilate into a culturally-Chinese Taiwan. This was very much on the upper end of my Chinese ability, and it used vocabulary I wasn't familiar with, but in one case, I was able to understand it because the subtitles used Chinese characters.

The indigenous speaker used the term '同化' to describe assimilation, and while I had never heard or seen this word before, I immediately knew that it meant assimilation. '同', the first character of the word, means same. It's used in words like '同意' (to agree), '同学' (classmate), and more. '化', the second character of the word, is used in '文化', meaning culture. Although I didn't previously know the word, because I knew that the characters making it up meant "same culture", it immediately registered in my head as assimilate.

I'd come to appreciate Chinese characters prior to this, but that moment gave me a clearer understanding of where logograms shine over phonograms. If the subtitles were written in pinyin (拼音) or zhuyin (注音), two systems for writing Chinese phonetically, I wouldn't have been able to understand. Likewise, if it were written in English, and I didn't already know the meaning of assimilate, I wouldn't have understood. I was only able to understand because the characters themselves denote the meaning of the word rather than the pronunciation of the word.

Historical Significance

Beyond the cases in which Chinese characters make it easier to communicate meaning, Chinese characters are also historically/culturally significant in that they act as a unifier for the Chinese language. China is a massive place, and it's also incredibly linguistically diverse. Different provinces and even cities can have dialects that are mutually unintelligible. People from across the country can only speak to each other easily today due to Mandarin acting as a common language. The system of writing, however, has long been standardized. Things like Chinese literature, poetry, and philosophy that characterize Chinese culture and what we think of as China were only possible due to a common writing system, and that wouldn't have worked nearly as well had the characters been phonographic. There are simply too many dialects, now and throughout history, that say things entirely differently.

This ability to go between different languages is also reflected by the use of Chinese characters in languages that we don't consider Chinese, such as Japanese and formerly Korean. In fact, when the Portuguese first reached Japan, they had a Chinese guide, and while the guide didn't know Japanese and the Japanese person they met didn't speak Chinese, they were able to communicate through written Chinese.

Lastly (for this post, I might come back to this topic at some point), the development of characters also reflects the development of Chinese history. One example is the Qin dynasty, the empire from which the name China is derived, standardizing the writing system into the form that evolved into the modern Chinese writing system. Another more recent example is the distinction between traditional Chinese characters (繁体/繁體) and simplified Characters (简体/簡體). The traditional form was the most recent iteration of Chinese writing during the Chinese Civil War between the CCP that controls the Chinese mainland and the Kuomintang that fled to Taiwan. The CCP created the simplified Characters as part of a campaign to boost literacy as only about 20-40% of the population could read. China adopted this system while Taiwan and other places that used Chinese characters largely stuck to traditional.