漢字, Kanji, Hanzi, Hanja - How Many Characters are there? - A look at ancient and modern history
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 เม.ย. 2022
- Characters (字) are logographic symbols that represent words, first developed in what is now Eastern China around 5,000 years ago. The use of Characters spread throughout East Asia and for thousands of years was the dominant and only form of writing known there. In the past different cultures, like the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and other ancient peoples, used these Characters to write their own languages, and more often than not developed their own as well. In this video I give a brief analysis of each documented culture that has or continues to use Chinese Character based writing systems to determine a total figure of how many Characters were ever developed.
Peoples covered and the local names for their scripts:
Chinese Characters - 漢字（繁体字）
Simplified Chinese Characters - 简体字
Singapore Simplified Characters - 新加坡簡體字
Japanese National Characters - 日本国字
Japanese New Character Forms - 日本新字体
Korean National Characters - 국자 (國字)
Korean Abbreviated Characters - 약자 (略字)
Vietnamese Chữ Nôm (𡨸喃)
Other Peoples:
Zhuang - Sawndip (Zhuang Script)
Khitan - Khitan Large Script
Jurchen - Jurchen Large Script
Western Xia - Tangut (Western Xia Script)
Sui - Sui Script (水書)
Yi - Classical Yi
![🔴 [TRỰC TIẾP] U20 Thái Lan VS LPBank Ninh Bình | Cúp VTV9 - Bình Điền 2024 | JET STUDIO](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3wRNdAy3DXs/mqdefault.jpg)
Fun fact:
In Korean 田 means dry field and 畓 means rice paddy.
In Japanese 田 means rice paddy and 畑 means dry field.
Like 畓 being a Korean national character 畑 is made and widely used in Japan. Note 水 (water) and 火 (fire) in these letters.
畑 is more like describing the primitive way of making new farmland - slash and burn forest and use as farmland for 2 or 3 years while the nutrient from the ash support crops then move on to the next forest for slash and burn. Interesting. Now how they make characters for the smaller elements or phenomena which were not visible nor known previously.
"田field" uses "火fire" to burn straw to fertilize and turns it into a "dry field畑"
"田" soaked in "water水", it becomes a paddy field"畓"
You can even roughly understand through this that Korea has more dry fields, while Japan has more paddy fields, because "田" in the default state is the most commonly used field in the local area😂😂
in China we say水田 旱田to express畓 畑，旱meams drought，Characters are good but Chara will go to death if you keep creating new Chara to express some homopropertious items with neglecting the word-creating ability.
Some Chara summary the basic element in the word. eg电, in Traditional Chinese電 means the tail of rain(雨)，Simplified kept the tail means electricity, then We have created电视(Electronic visions, or Television) 电子(the essence of electricity, or Electron) by the basic element电。Their is hundruds of others and as Chinese we can create several words randomly in any life scene.
Actually we Japanese often use 水田 for rice paddy.😂
4:42 The character え comes from the cursive script of 衣 and not 之 which is the origin of し
how did 之 becomes し ??? it doesnt even make sense
@@DaniSC_real Google Japanese cursive script
I also made the mistake of believing that the Chinese character 之 make hiragana arise え, When it actually arose し, but I still doubt that because it doesn't look similar.
@@slushfilm dude doesnt know what a comment is. Also stop going to reddit my guy
And Unicode thought they could squeeze every character into 16-bits (65536 codepoints). Clearly they didn't realize that Standard Chinese alone would fill the entire available space nearly twice over. It's a good thing that they reserved two entire planes of 65536 codepoints just for CJK characters, but even that wouldn't leave much room for everything other than Standard Chinese. Guess we can look forward to a Quternary Ideographic Plane and Quinary Ideographic Plane, one of which would be reserved exclusively for Yi. The official proposal from China for Yi characters asked for 88613 characters, just barely shy of the 90 000 given in the video.
Actually quite a few Unicode developers thought that 65,536 code points wouldn't be enough, but there was a big argument about it around 1990 and the folks wanting a smaller size won. And then kinda lost later when they had to expand past that anyway.
They knew they couldn't squeeze every character into 16 bits. The original proposal states that Unicode was to be used for the characters used in modern texts, and obsolete or rare characters shouldn't be conjesting the list of useful characters. They were aware of the problem, but decided to focus on the future, not the past. You have to remember that at the time the development of unicode started 32-bit computers were still rather new.
IIRC Unicode does not mandate the byte representation of the characters. They only develop the code points to represent the characters. You're probably thinking of the UTF-16 encoding.
You probably could if you decompose it.
I mean to be fair. Unicode was supposed to replace the old ISO-2022 based national standards which had a hard limit of 8836 characters.
Though Joe Becker's original estimate of extant characters was "far below 16,384". Which turned out to be way off.
Asian countries otw to have the hardest, most confusing yet beautiful languages known to humanity for no reason:
it's hard because each character has its tone and pronunciation, completely different from English and other languages that use an alphabet, missing either one completely changes the character, but many characters just have a different radical to differentiate them, so you have to remember all of them
Beautiful? Lol. Tonal languages, and just East Asian languages in general sound horrible. 9 times out of 10 and especially if it’s a woman talking it sounds like an animal is dying. And a lot of their women are pretty, so I’m not just saying this out of racism sake lol
@@sneedfeed3179still better than ebonic lol
@@ZETA14.88based
@@danielzhang1916alphabet indicate sound so any sound in Chinese can use alphabet instead use signs to indicate meaning mean you must remember over 20k signs are overwhelmed for people to learn Chinese writing that's why Chinese language is most unpopular hate writing make Chinese so shy scare stiff silent sissy slow square sick shameful sad small with small slantt eye so you folk can focus reading.
You should be more popular than you currently are. So much interesting videos!
This is so far the best and most comprehensive video about Hanzi / Hanja / Kanji / Chu Nom. Very informative! Well done!👍👍👍
Chữ nôm ? Hán tự nhé bro
No kanji and Hanja and Chu Nom in history. Only Hanzi 漢字 in history.
Hanji(Chinese characters in Japanese) = wrong Chinese characters
Hanja kanji hanzi hantu
Fantastic video. Thoroughly structured. Loved your academic approach to the topic. And kudos to always reminding the viewer that estimations are not facts.
Subscribed in an instant.
I'm not sure that Tangut or Yi scripts can be counted. They are wildly different. In fact, I could only see the Zhuang's Sawndip a part of the Chinese character family. Jurchen and Khitan scripts are clearly influenced but, wouldn't be called within the zone of the Chinese characters.
After a year of reflection on this video I have to agree with you. While this isn't a scholarly look at character based writing systems, I think I would do it differently if I redid the video today. My assertion that all character writing systems of that area of the world are "漢字" is almost like saying every language using latin letters is latin based, influenced no doubt, but not a necessarily a direct descendent. But I still think this provides an interesting look at the different characters of the orient. Thanks for the comment.
@@InkboxSoftware yeah, definitely. Greek, Latin and Cyrillic are all based on the Phoenician script and they even overlap to some extent. Meanwhile Georgian and Armenian are not. But there is some influence. The situation is kinda similar here.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
@@yanyanz3011 well the Mandarin name of it. Japanese name is “Kanji”, Korean name is “Hanja”. I used more of the neutral English naming. Not that wrong; 漢 is “Chinese” and 字 is “letter, writing character”. It’s literally the translation of “Hanzi”.
@@yorgunsamuray I'm sorry, Koreans like to steal the history of other countries and need to be vigilant at all times
This is a pretty incredibly-researched video! And unlike a lot of videos that ask questions and never truly answer them, there is an actual specific answer at the end, even if we can never know exactly how many Chinese-style characters there were. Great stuff!
This is the most comprehensive presentation about 漢字 and their derived scripts I've found on the English side of TH-cam. I learned some new interesting information from this video.As a Mandarin learner, I'm quite familiar with 漢字，but didn't know much about the 國字s from Korea and Japan.
Chinese was brought to Japan in the 5th-6th century C.E.
It’s funny, just yesterday I was looking for a good video on this topic but couldn’t find anything, and then this video got recommended to me today! I guess that means the algorithm is doing it’s job. It satisfies my itch for this topic so I’m glad I came across it! I’ll check out this other video too
Amazing video! As a learner of Japanese and Korean, this scratched an itch I didn’t think could be scratched
Excellently well researched and respectfully presented.
I love your videos, these are so interesting!
Excellent presentation and good luck with people who are still stuck with the writing system which one has to memorize few thousands symbols/characters/ideograms. I am lucky to read/write/understand the greatest writing system Hangul plus English alphabet.
You have a great, varied and interesting channel! I’m very glad to find it.
The "漢字" shown in the video is actually in Japanese version of simplified characters. I think it's due to the font being used though.
Would you count those variations as different characters? I think I would, but I guess that would open a bigger debate on whether different styles count as different characters, as they have different ammounts of strokes
not sure if i would count the Yi characters. they are aesthetically very different, or at least their modern reflexes are.
also 㔔 is just the old koreans trolling us through time, isn't it?
I think that character would be pronounced Kang?
I think it was an experiment to use chinese characters combine with hangul to increase number of sounds? Or an intermediate script before current Hangul was finalised?
so much work in this video
와... 대단하네요. 한자에 대해서 알고 싶은 사람에게 좋은 참고가 될 것 같아요.
What a great video! I think this video will be a good reference for those who want to know about Chinese Characters.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
@@yanyanz3011 that is just for chinese people bro
chinese characters are not chinese thing like alphabet in EU
japanese characters are kanji and korean characters are hanja
@@thereasonwhy6313 Chinese Hanzi are not Chinese. Whose are they? Please read more books
Excellent introduction of 漢字 🀄🀄🀄👍👍👍More people should know your video!👁👁👁💪💪💪❤❤❤❤❤
people always get blown away with myriads of Chinese character, but most of them never realize that we only use abt a tenth of them in daily life, even so many of them was surprisingly simple by combining some basic, typical hanzi into one. Hanzi is much simple and making sense than most of the western peoplr thought
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Thanks for sharing
It's worth noting that a lot of Han Chinese languages cannot be written using the most standard characters due to a lack of standardisation process, and if newly adopted characters to write Cantonese and Taiwanese Hokkien is included, then the numbers could be higher.
That's not necessarily true. For example in Hokkien/Min Nan/Taiwanese, many of the spoken words do have corresponding characters in kai style written characters. The only thing is that many of them were ancient and archaic characters that modern Chinese don't use as much. So many people ended up created or using other characters to informally represent that spoken word.
was wondering if you ganna mention Western Xia（西夏）, Great job mate !
You make Super Mario Bros hacks, you talk about Typography history, how am I not following your channel already?
A question below was about why Chu Nom was not popular in Vietnam. Chu Nom was used to write pure Vietnamese words (what are pure Vietnamese words is another problem to be discussed), however, these characters were perhaps too complicated to learn, hence in fact, it has never been officially used in the courts. In some periods, Chu Nom was promoted and encouraged, just to be discouraged later.
However, some greatest works of Vietnamese literature were written in Chu Nom, for example The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, of poems of Ho Xuan Huong.
Dude I can’t remember how to write one to ten in Chu Nom
All I knew about Yi writing was the syllabary. When you announced how many characters were in the Yi dictionary, my jaw dropped!
Despite my admittedly limited knowledge of Japanese and Chinese, I was pleased to recognise the constituent parts of the Korean character for "rice paddy" as water and field
Exactly what I wanted to see, I love the history of chinese writing
So if we try to guesstimate, there are probably around 500,000 characters, if we include ones that were lost to history and guess their approximate quantity.
The Chinese characters are actually comparable to that of Latin and Germanic languages. Even though both use letters, the people from China, Korea, and Japan can understand each other's languages to a certain extent. Whereas the languages used by the Khitans, Jurchens, and Western Xia are incomprehensible with the languages of the south. Just like how Germanic languages and Latin languages are not easily comprehensible and have very little lexical similarities.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
and Vietnam
get an education
Pretty interesting
I envy your ability to perfectly pronounce Chinese characters properly
Tbh not really, but I also appreciate the effort
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Could you make a video about the radical system in Chinese and Japanese?
My Korean in-laws just laughed when I asked about Hanja. They said "Oh, they pretend to teach those old things to us in school, and we pretend to learn them - then the moment we graduate we never see them again". One of them, a teenager, said if anyone ever actually uses Hanja characters when writing, it's considering a total affectation & silly. "It's like if an English speaker writes poetry with a quill pen, it's just somebody being weird". I know in North Korea all Hanja are banned.
wow, that's so true! I was born in Korea and lived until univ. and now living in Canada, and I don't think I can read most of hanja. lol maybe I remember some numbers and elements words such as fire, water, and tree things. maybe around 20-30 characters? fyi, I learned hanja only in middle school for 3years.
@@pluto1526 Older people can read and write a lot more because it used to be taught and used more widely.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters or Hanja.
Koreans don't care if they can't read historical documents or even news papers 30 years ago.
yap more than younger people but still not like a few thousand or hundred words. My parents would know maybe around 100 characters, and for sure forgot about them a lot by now cuz never use them @@sharpasacueball
I was expecting to see the mention of 女書(female script) and is surprised that it wasn't even mentioned.
It's called nüshu, not female script
@@yanyanz3011 That's pinyin, what I did is translated them into English.
There are a lot of linguists trying to come up with typological classifications for the Chinese writing system. Logography is good enough for most people not interested in the fine details and who are not academics or linguists.
Joyce (2016) classifies the Chinese writing system as "morphologic" since it is a writing system that uses morphemes to convey meaning. It isn't accurate to say that the Chinese writing system uses characters to represent words since there are actually very few single characters that function as words. Most words in Chinese are made up of two morphemes (bimorphemic or disyllabic). Some Chinese characters cannot be used alone (bound morpheme), which means that they have no meaning without another character or more.
For example, 珊瑚 means "coral," but 珊 and 瑚 cannot be used by themselves and are inherently meaningless without each other.
This would undermine the idea that Chinese characters represent words, among other counterexamples.
Reference:
Joyce, T. (2016). Writing systems and scripts. In A. Rocci & L. de Saussure (Eds.), Verbal communication (Handbooks of Communication Science 3) (pp. 287-308). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
That’s so stupid.
You picked out a rare example of a multi-character word where the morphemes are bound and not words in of themselves.
THAT’S INCREDIBLY RARE.
99%+ of morphemes can and do function as independent words as well as morphemes to construct words. 😂
@@HakuYuki001 99% is a big claim, but it's still true that the majority of words in Chinese are disyllabic, not monosyllabic. Chinese was more monosyllabic in the past, especially true for Classical Chinese, but that has since changed.
Also, I was arguing against the claim that Chinese characters represent words. Yes, there are monosyllabic words, but you would then have to explain exceptions of bound morphemes if your claim is that characters represent words. If you can't deal with exceptions, then you have to change your claim being made to account for exceptions to the claim. The fact that there are bound morphemes undermines the idea that characters represent words.
Hello, Inkbox. I feel this video is interesting and educational.
But, I wanna add the largest numbers of Chinese characters recorded in some dictionaries. So, according to Wikipedia (Sadly, It was edited recently with no numbering of characters in dictionaries, but you can find previous article in "Last edited"), Greater China (Well, I include Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) has 異體字字典 (Yitizi Zidian/Dictionary of Chinese character Variants) published in Taiwan which contains 106,330 Chinese characters. Japan has Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典/The Great Chinese-Japanese Dictionary) contains 50,305 Chinese characters. And also, Korea published Han Han Dae Sajeon (漢韓大辭典/한한대사전/The Great Dictionary of Hanja-Hangeul) which contains 53,667 Chinese characters.
Why do you use the Japanese simiplification of 漢 even when talking about Chinese and Korean use? The traditional character has an extra line the Japanese one removed.
hey the "seal" at 13:34 is incredibly aesthetically pleasing, do you have any links or info on how to read more about that? it sorta connects with my obsession about space-filling curves (mathematical stuff).
Google 篆書印章 篆書印鑑 or 篆書体
I don’t know about that seal in particular, but there was a system of writing Mongolian used by one of the mongol dynasties in China called Phags Pa script and it often was used in seals in a way that looks very similar!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script here's the wikipedia page on the script used. It's used heavily in official state documents/seals (like passports and government stamps, kind of like a signature). If you load the article in japanese there's much more information so you'll just have to use google translate and look at the pictures. Ultimately it's mainly just a way of making logos look fancy
這基本上是漢字的一種特殊的書寫方式，稱之為“篆書”，常用於政府的印章，是非常嚴肅莊重的
Please give links of your sources so people can do their own research
What about naxi dongba? Its not in unicode yet, but it is still sorta in use.
There are not just one Chữ Nôm. Some minority people in Vietnam created their own version which very similar to Chữ Nôm but with their language (sorry bad english)
Okay, I haven't heard of that, do you know which minorities?
@@InkboxSoftware Tày & Dao (in Vietnamese)
I like "小纂"so much!
Cool
By the way, "Chu Nom" in Khmer (Cambodian) means "to have to pee" lol
Haha, how funny (baby boring)
@@Jacob.D. ok
甲骨文
Why is the 骨 character, written in Japanese? Should the little square be on the left side? Since it’s Chinese?
Should I invent a word, can I then just invent a character if it is translated in languages like chinese? (Hypotheticaly)
There are at least 10000 Traditional Chinese characters, but most of those characters are not used in everyday language. Some were used in old poetry and writings. The PRC use Simplified Chinese that use shortened characters for the less literate.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
Only 15k views ??? How ?
as a taiwanese person that thumbail looks soooo cursed out of context
Trần Nhân Tông didn't bring Chữ Nôm into official writing. This part is wrong. The picture you showed is Hồ Quý Li, who did try to bring Chữ Nôm into official writing.
I love this scripture system no matter how hard it is, I love how Japanese mix Kanji and two different syllabaries
Imagine that hieroglyphs and cuneiform scripture never lost
Do Chinese have something like the Jōyō Kanji list? It would be usefol to reduce the number of characters, and also unify the simplifications from China and Japan
The Simplified Chinese Script is called 簡体字. I heard it's around 2200 new ones but the overall Kanji of 簡体字 are considered around 8000. Because there were probably already a lot of Kanji that were considered simple/easy.
@@danielantony1882 the japanese kanji was simplified after the world war II and they created a list of the most common used, originally were around 1800 but today they are like 2200, not because people today use more kanji but when they made the list they forgot the include some important ones
@@floptaxie68 I'm talking about Chinese Kanji. That's literally what Kanji means.
@@danielantony1882: HANZI, not "Chinese Kanji".
@@carltomacruz9138 Same thing, bro. Just different pronunciation. I mean, if we're just going with the orignal ownership idea then might as well just call it Kanji. You don't need to get butthurt simply because I'm not calling it Hanzi. It's literally the same thing.
Chu nom characters are really interesting also, why is this not popular?
Even mostly Vietnamese people don't give a sh!t to that script. This is a sad reality as Vietnam has given up on Han Nom
@@nomnaday thanks for explaining!
Colonization
Fake nationalism fueled by colonialism
Too outdated too old fashioned too hard to learn n use so why use character writing for instead use spelling system lot easy n faster. That's why nobody use character writing but dumbb Chinese.
13:28 what is this script?
There are many chinese characters, but there would always be some useles characters that can't be pronounced like: ，，，， and others.
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
As a Chinese, I can't understand all the words in the video, it's very hard to us.
You forgot to add the characters used by American and European hipsters incorrectly in tattoos
We should call them caricatures.
I like the depth of this video. Thanks for making this!
But actually counting all the convoluted historic variants of characters is quite nonsensical to say the least. It's like, when faced with a question how many Greek characters are there, replying "well, certainly over a hundred, let's think about all the lost characters, historic glyph forms and maybe even about the Minoan script". Obviously, the common sense answer should be 24.
And, on that matter, I don't understand why you even count Khitan, Sui and Yi. It's like counting Cherokee and Inuit scripts into Latin because they were 'influenced'
How many characters are there? As many as you want. I can just make new ones whenever.
Fascinating. One thing that came to mind was Taiwan. They don’t have their own variants or national characters?
In Taiwan there is the Standard Form of National Characters released by the Ministry of Education. It does look like they have some of their own unique forms of Characters as well, although not like the National Characters from Japan or Korea. Taiwan has only recently (since 1949) been a separate political entity from the mainland and the majority of the educated officials in those early days came from the mainland itself, meaning that they didn't have the same reasons to create National Characters as other nations did because they were, are still are, Chinese. The best way to put it might be that The Standard Form of National Characters is the standard that was set by the Ministry of Education of The Republic of China for the writing of Chinese Characters, which does hold some differences in particular with how the standards are set for the People's Republic of China (mainland China), but does not result in the creation of new Characters unique to that island.
In Taiwan we use traditional Chinese characters instead of simplified Chinese characters,which is the original writing system in Chinese history
Taiwanese as a dialect of Sino language group indeed has many unique vocabularies, and so on the characters for them.
And besides the dialect part, on a level of formal occasions, Taiwan is actually the one that keeps the very 'fundamental' version of Chinese writings; And on the contrary, we (the PR. China) have actually made many reforms on those characters, and in some cases even borrowed pieces of your Japanese simplified Kanji back.
That's why sometimes the Taiwanese mention our simplified Chinese characters are broken (残体字）
Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters but some simplified characters are used informally, there is also new characters for written vernacular Hokkien like 𪜶, but the majority of them can't be displayed on computers.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use standard Chinese (i.e. traditional Chinese, the non-simplified ver.)
4:20 I see what you did there with the map of Japan. Very good, very good. Haha
日本は樺太を取り戻す。絶対に。
Disappointed by lack of mentionment of the 則天文字
That red character in thumbnail looks sus
Now memorize them all.
I’ve made many videos teaching Chinese language vividly and in a funny way. I hope you can recommend my videos to those who want to learn Chinese.
I hope more people can learn Chinese to get comprehensive firsthand information about China and most likely seek more job opportunities.
you don't need to, I'm Chinese American and I can read and write the commonly used ones
Q:How Many Characters are there?
A:How many characters do you want?
Katsumotonese letters look like the Burmese script but cursed lol
you forgot the Nv script. 女書。
It's called nüshu.
The letter on the middle of the thumbnail looks kinda cursed 💀
*logosyllabic (except in Japanese)
Your voice sounds like organic chemistry tutor…?
Jurchen....the pronunciation of letter J is Y😑 if you know how to pronounce 女(汝)真
汉字is not character, it literally means Han character. Han is the majority ethnic group of China. so hanzi, kanji all mean Chinese character
Chinese writing system is called Hanzi, not Chinese characters.
i havent seen anything yet but the thumbnail made me immensely uncomfortable
you miss 女書
力加贺
你封面那些汉字奇奇怪怪
用了幾千年。當然多咯。
惊现小黑子
妳幹嗎，啊呦@@YurinKawasumi
Yes, all those characters exist, but I think it would be misleading to call them all 漢字, as clearly, there were sets of characters that were invented by other peoples, such as mentioned here, the Vietnamese, Yi etc.
I guess it depends on what the question is. Do we want to know a more or less exhaustive list of every character that ever stemmed from the 漢字 beast? Yes. It's "at least 235,647."
But when counting 漢字 characters, why must we necessarily include all those character sets NOT invented or used by 漢 Chinese? Can those be called "漢字?" I don't think so. That's taking credit from all those people who devised their own writing styles.
Strictly speaking, only those characters created and used by the 漢 people are 漢字. So rather than make the task of counting 漢字 needlessly complicated, I think it's better to keep things simple. How many characters were devised by the 漢 people?
In my mind, that is the true number.
Also, how many of them are being used today? That would make the task even simpler.
When counting Roman characters, do we count all those characters that have fallen out of disuse? Þ/þ for example? We use 26 characters in English, _but_ Þ/þ was replaced with Th/th. So do we count that or leave it out?
So we can simplify the task of counting 漢字 characters by limiting ourselves to only the characters that the 漢 people created, and we can further simplify it by limiting ourselves to only those characters used today.
How many characters must someone learn to read any Chinese newspaper?
That's the number I want to know.
In Japan, there are 2,332 characters officially designated as essential for every day use. (常用漢字) Though my sources say that realistically most Japanese know about 3,000.
Is this number the same in China?
to be honest lot of these characters seems over exaggerated
For people who live in traditional characters environment, the simpified characters are unaesthetic. The strcture and balance of the characters are wrecked.
三星이코노
現代自動車
㔔덩
한자
How many English words are there? Each one is spelled in a unique way, with no clear, logical rules, and you just have to remember each one by root memorisation.
I wouldn't put it that way, English has a lot of same-sounding words like bight, bite, eight, ate, and similar-spelled words like tough, through, sought, slough... Chinese characters have their own tone and pronunciation which both have to be correct or it's all wrong
@@danielzhang1916 there are also homophones in Mandarin
@@danielzhang1916 There are infinitely more homophones in Chinese than English. In fact, thats why a logographic written system is most efficient for Chinese, otherwise it’d be too confusing to only write with an alphabet.
@@mythrin that's not correct, just because they have the same pronunciation, does not mean they are the same thing, wang1 and wang4 are totally different characters written down, if you are not precise, then it is completely wrong, it is not the same idea as a homophone at all
@@mythrinthen how Chinese speak among by imagine how you write no just by what yr talking about. Many languages have lot more same sound writing but different meaning than Chinese but all use alphabet now like English like buy by bi by info inform into indeed. Duh. Just write slightly different or no need to.
English doesn't have a phonetic alphabet
*No cantonese characters? :c*
there is no such thing as that. The difference between cantonese and madarin is how they pronouce differently the same character. the writing is exactly the same.
@@dwarfplayerof course I know it. I am from Guangdong. every dialacts of chinese has its some unique characters, but those are only used in spoken language and only take a very limited part.
@@dwarfplayer what's more, so-called "cantonese characters" is a part of Chinese characters
I will say they are all chinese characters,but there is some Mandarin use that Cantonese don't and vice versa.
Exactly, like 冇 is just more popular used in Cantonese, it's not a character created for Cantonese in lieu of its original character 无/無, but also it's pronounced/understood in Mandarin & other Chinese dialects to mean nothing/not-having.
Im chinese and said "wtf" to half of those fucked up characters
IT'S NOT Pronounced khih tan IT'S Pronounced khee tan
The Republic of China (Taiwan and several islands) still uses the standard (traditional) kai script characters. Hong Kong and Macao also uses traditional characters as do many oversea Chinese. However, more and more oversea Chinese have begun to use the simplified characters in recent decades.
One thing very interesting about standard (traditional) and simplified characters is that they do not have a one to one correspondence. Using mathematical terms, standard and simplified relation is not a one to one function. One simplified characters can be linked to several standard characters. So this leads to a confusing situation when people writes in simplified characters and then "google" or "ai" convert back to standard characters. Since the current conversion process does not take the context into consideration, it usually created many errors when going from simplified back to standard.
Also, the fundamental logic behind the development of many simplified characters are lacking to say the least. It lacks logical consistency, and many characters are simplified with simple expediency that does not make sense as a whole system. It also several destroys the integrity of the Chinese character system as a whole, destroying its ideogram meanings. Many simplified characters lost its radical roots and the parts that give its ideogram meaning. Standard kai script is already a simplified system from the previous "clerical script" but still retains the elements that can be traced back to clericial, seal scripts and back to bronze and bone oracle scripts. However, the simplfied script created by the Chinese communists disregard that historical connection, so just looking at many of the simplified characters, one would have no idea how it was connected to the standard scripts and let alone back to the bronze and bone scripts.
With the advent of computer technology and widespread of education, there's no excuse for using the simplified script anymore. We should all return to the standard characters that has been used for more than 2000 years now. It is a balanced system, that maintains connections to the roots and maintains a cultural and historical continuity, while not overwhelmingly difficult to learn and to use in daily life, as people of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and oversea Chinese demonstrates.
Unfortunately, the usage of simplified characters is not a simple linguistic question, but a political questions tied to the Chinese Communist Party. So until the CCP is gone, the majority of China may not return to the standard characters.
First, most of China’s standardized Chinese characters are derived from ancient vulgar characters, which can be found in stone tablets and calligraphy of past dynasties. Some standard Chinese characters are even older than the so-called "traditional Chinese characters". For example, "气" originated from the Warring States Period, and "氣" first appeared in the Han Dynasty.
Second, most of the so-called "the fundamental logic behind the development of Chinese characters" comes from 《说文解字》 written by Xu Shen of the Han Dynasty. According to archaeological evidence, 《说文解字》is just Xu Shen's subjective speculation based on the Chinese characters that existed at that time, and is far from the true development history of Chinese characters. For example, "射", 《说文解字》says "弓弩发於身（the bow and crossbow are fired from the body）", but according to archeology, the word "射",means "a bow plus an arrow", and there is no "body" at all.
Third, from ancient times to the present, only the official characters stipulated by the Chinese government as 中华正朔 are correct, and other fonts are unorthodox. So when you write Chinese characters, you either write standard Chinese characters, or you just write wrong Chinese characters.
Why did you regard simplified Chinese? It is an atrocity and culture crime. It is not be put into consideration. 13:24 And they should be divided again. They do not belong together.
so how do u think of 新字体？
@angrybull2340 Shinjitai is fine and not comparable with simplified Chinese which is an atrocity. Shinjitai still looks normal unlike simplified Chinese.
@@Mi_Fa_Volare lol bigot
@@freakmoister Do you even know what this word means?
No kanji and Hanja in history. Only Hanzi 漢字 in history.
Hanji(Chinese characters in Japanese) = wrong Chinese characters
Just two pronunciations for the same characters 漢字
@@InkboxSoftware The creator of "Korean characters" (諺文real history name). It is ancient Chinese people (royal nobles and scholars in peninsula) who can speak fluent Chinese language and deep understanding of Chinese characters漢字 and classic Chinese文言文 .
Use the method of decomposing Chinese characters. Mixed Koreans' language. Creation makes indigenous Koreans who speak Korean. The symbol "Korean characters"(諺文real history name) that Korean can be used.
For more than 2000 years, the Korean Peninsula has been Chinese territorial and local regimes. Official languages and texts are also Chinese languages and Chinese characters漢字(classic Chinese文言文) .
1910. Japanese occupation of the Korea Peninsula (Chaoxian Peninsula朝鮮半島 , Real historical name - Chinese territory before 1910). The Japanese abolished Chinese characters. Korean language and characters (invention of the 15th century) of indigenous language began to popularize on the Korea Peninsula ( Chaoxian Peninsula朝鮮半島 ) .
1950. With the help of the USA. Become an independent country (North and South Korea), dominated by the Korean ethnic (white clothes Ethnic白衣民族). The official language is Korean language and Korean characters, which is only 70 years of history.
------------------------
Today Korean Ethnic ancestors are the southernmost indigenous people in the ancient korean peninsula (Chaoxian Peninsula朝鮮半島 , Real historical name - Chinese territory before 1910)It is known as "white clothes Ethnic白衣民族" in history. They speak Korean language. There is no characters. There is no coin (exchange items).
In history, Korean women clothes (Hanbok) will show nipples after marriage (Westerners Record photos). Women use their heads to transport things. The ancient Koreans were 95% wearing white (without any patterns and dyes). This is also the identity of the Korean ethnic's ancestors as "white clothes Ethnic白衣民族" to be used by non -Korean ethnic (ancient Chinese do not wear white clothes, except funeral). This is very certain.
Goguryeo 高句麗 is one of the Chinese regimes of the northern region established by the Chinese . Baekje 百濟, Silla 新羅. (formerly known as: China Tang Silla 唐新羅. ).... It is also a regional regime established by the Chinese.Their kings and nobles are proficient in Chinese language. They use Chinese characters.
Wong's Goryeo王氏高麗, li' Joseon李氏朝鮮 ... .....
Their royal nobles are not the same ethnic group with Pingmin slave. The royal nobles are Chinese and descendants (born on the peninsula). Civilian slaves are indigenous Koreans.
Their king and nobles can communicate with the Chinese. Long -term exchanges with the Chinese. Using Chinese language and text represents noble identity. (They use the name of the Chinese . Chinese governance method. They wearing Chinese clothes. Chinese emperor is a parent.).
They used various methods to limit class mobility to avoid others (koreans) from becoming "nobles".
Their people and slaves (white clothes Ethnic白衣民族) are prohibited and learned Chinese language and Chinese characters. These people use Korean language. There is no characters (until the 15th century). Almost all are illiterate.
Anceint japan (before 13th century )= 東瀛 & 扶桑 & 倭 . (the name set by the Chinese emperor. It is also the name of the historical record)
Today japan = 日本
Anceint korea= 朝鮮 (and 高包麗. 百濟. 新羅. 王氏高麗. 李氏朝鮮) . (the name set by the Chinese emperor. It is also the name of the historical record)
Today korea = 韓國(南北)
Anceint Nonth Vietnam= 交趾 . (the name set by the Chinese emperor. It is also the name of the historical record)
Today Vietnam = 越南
Anceint Okinawa= 琉球. (the name set by the Chinese emperor. It is also the name of the historical record)
Today Okinawa = 沖繩
@@InkboxSoftware He is providing incorrect information. Even educated ancient Koreans could not speak Chinese, as it is a different language from Korean. They could only communicate through texts, as Confucian scriptures were used as textbooks in ancient Korea. Ancient Koreans spoke the ancient Korean language and simply lacked their own writing system until the creation of Hangul in 1443 (the 25th year of King Sejong's reign). If ancient Korea was a Chinese territory and local regime, then South Korea is the 51st state of the USA.
Wonder how back then teach Chinese when dictionary were too expensive but for alphabet no need dictionary unless not native speaker.
一三
6:15 전범기를 그냥 박아넣었네 ㅈㄹ
친한국언론 아사히신문에 무슨 말버릇이냐?
English? Phonetic alphabets? Hell no please!
Thumbnail displaying characters that only 3 out of 24 characters I could actually read, several bug characters, and none of them are commonly used. This uploaded either knows nothing about Chinese or he wants you to get a complicated image of Chinese characters in the first place. Silly or ill minded, you name it.
I won’t watch the video.
Those who watched it can tell me, how much more you want to learn Chinese after watching it and how much new stuff did you learn.
Which 3 could you read?
Hangul honestly is so practical compared to the Chinese characters..I’m just surprised they survived to this day…they’re so ancient, awesome to observe but hell to write or communicate with the external world outside china..
I believe it was a barrier for the Chinese economy…Japanese government knew that it would be isolating if they kept using them..smart and brave for sure that they invented another set of characters that still look like their original Chinese ones but are treated like an alphabet, impressive!..
I don’t know why I feel sadness for people who make all this effort to write a simple sentence must be torture i heard once someone saying that Chinese is stuck in time..I can’t relate more the image you get out of this is the unwillingness to change and evolve it breaks my heart because the first people to experience the benefits of a normal alphabet are the Chinese citizens themselves..the question is why..?
Chinese characters are pretty practical once you are in the Chinese-character cultural sphere. It transcends the language barriers. Even if you don’t know the other language you can communicate by using the characters.
In the west, they use the same alphabet but you can’t understand for example “chat” without knowing that it means “cat” in French. In east Asia we use the same character 猫 for “cat” so we can understand each other’s words without knowing the language.
This feature is important especially in China because it’s a multicultural and multilingual country. They can understand each other because of the fact that they share the same characters.
Despite the Latin alphabet being common among European languages, it never is "the same". Modern English is a testament to this. Large mouth bass, and a bass guitar, while "bass" is spelled exactly the same in both instances, the meaning and pronunciation of the "a" is so different from each other. 26 letters is English alone, not every language that makes use of this script. I've learned German in school and there's 30 letters, everything in English plus ä, ö, ü and ß. Spanish employs "ñ" so that's probably over 26 too.
because your comment can be written with 200 chinese characters and even shorter if we sacrifice redundancy.
Hangul is most definitely revolutionary in terms of simplicity, practicality and structure.
But it naturally carries the disadvantages of any other phonetic alphabet: a number of words made using Hangul overlap with similar or most problematically, identical letters to mean completely different things. Unlike Chinese, there aren’t specific tones for the overlapping vocabulary nor are there special differentiating signs. Hangul doesn’t use spacing like the Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Sanskrit and other phonetic character sets around the world, which have a different effect.
Nevertheless, because the main method of recognizing which word the specific set of Hangul words refers to is though surrounding context, interpreting texts have issues of being inaccurate, mistaken or can create confusion.
Therefore, as much as Hangul is an amazing script with great distinctive features, it should be recognized along with its flaws.
Anyway I think Hanja should be revived
Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world, that's why they all borrowed the characters, would you tell Indians, other Asians that their languages are outdated? That's because people don't understand the logic of the characters, it looks complicated to learn but that's because it is a logographic language, each character has its own tone and pronunciation, if either one is wrong then it completely changes the meaning, it is not "stuck in time and unwilling to change", why should it have to change for anyone else
Modern day Zhuang Latin alphabet is AWFUL!!!
自以為是 ，亂講一通 ，胡說八道 %！！
你又以為你知道多少？