1. Now the total number of Chinese characters is very small.
At present, the total number of Chinese characters has not been decided. It is generally believed that there are 3500 commonly used Chinese characters and 3500 commonly used Chinese characters, so there are 7000 commonly used Chinese characters in Chinese character I * * *. 1988, the "modern Chinese common character list" promulgated by the state included 7000 common Chinese characters. Compared with some other languages in the world, this number is relatively small. The total number of Chinese characters is small and easy to learn. There are many languages such as English and Vietnamese, which is one of the main reasons why they are difficult to learn.
Why can the total number of Chinese characters be so small? It is because the basic unit of Chinese, that is, the service object of Chinese characters, is not words, but words. These thousands of words can form hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of words, thus meeting the needs of a language. However, the small number of existing Chinese characters does lead to many Chinese characters, such as mouth, bell, fast, wrong and so on. , become homophone polysemous words, that is, the same word, the same pronunciation represents more than two unrelated meanings; It also causes some Chinese characters, such as "Da", "Hui" and "Du", to become homographs and polysemous words, that is, the same word has two or more pronunciations, and each pronunciation represents irrelevant meanings. When using these polysemous words to express information, readers must judge which meaning these words represent according to the context, so sometimes there are some puzzling or ambiguous phenomena when using these polysemous words to express information. For example, some students don't know that the word "nothing" in "an object submerged in water" is polyphonic when doing physics problems, so they can't understand this sentence. Many languages in the world have some polysemous words. Generally speaking, as long as it does not exceed a certain proportion, all kinds of information can be expressed clearly.
2. Now Chinese characters are composed of horizontal, left and vertical strokes.
At present, the most basic symbols of Chinese characters are horizontal, left, vertical, pressure, dot, fold, hook and stroke lifting. These strokes do not represent sounds, and most languages in the world are composed of symbols (mostly pinyin letters) that represent sounds.
3. Now Chinese characters are square characters.
At present, Chinese characters are square characters composed of strokes, while most languages in the world are bar characters composed of symbols representing sounds. Compared with strip characters, square Chinese characters not only have more obvious font differences, but also show more concentrated differences, so the font signal of Chinese characters is very strong.
4. At present, the shape of Chinese characters is fixed.
At present, the shape of Chinese characters is fixed. They do not change with the change of the part of speech of a word, whether the word plays the role of subject or predicate in a sentence, or whether the environment it refers to is past or present, true or false.
Most of the existing Chinese characters can be divided into some parts.
Nowadays, Chinese characters can generally be divided into two categories, single words and compound words. Compound words account for the vast majority. Compound words can be divided into parts, for example, the word "tuo" can be divided into two parts: "one" and "yes" In fact, many single words can also be divided into parts. For example, "stone" can be further divided into "mouth" and "mouth".
6. There are many components that make up Chinese characters.
There are many components that make up Chinese characters. About 200 components are only used for character retrieval. In addition, there are more than 300 ~600 other components.
7. Many components of existing Chinese characters are not easy to understand.
Although philological works such as Shuo Wen Jie Zi explain the reasons for the formation of ancient Chinese characters, there are many reasons, and because of the evolution of Chinese language, some reasons for the formation of ancient Chinese characters are difficult to identify in Chinese characters now. Therefore, many existing Chinese characters are difficult to understand in terms of component composition. For example, it is difficult for ordinary people to understand why the word "Chen" is made up of "?" Composition and why the word "de" is composed of "white" and "spoon", why the word "what" is unilateral, why the word "special" is composed of "cow" instead of "horse", and why readers can analyze any paragraph in this book to see if they can explain why 10% of Chinese characters is composed of various parts.
8. The current Chinese characters contain rich cultural connotations.
Many Chinese characters contain rich cultural connotations. For example, the word "sheep" is simply a beautiful and concise sketch of a sheep. The word "word" itself tells us that word is a treasure, and the word "letter" can spread the warning left by our ancestors thousands of years ago, "people should have credit when they say it." These cultural connotations help us to learn Chinese characters.
Generally speaking, the cultural connotation of Chinese characters is richer and more intuitive.
9. The structure of Chinese characters is very beautiful now.
Now the structure of Chinese characters is very beautiful. The author believes that this elegance is reflected in the following six aspects: ① Many Chinese characters contain the above-mentioned rich cultural connotations; ② The strokes of Chinese characters are rigid (such as horizontal, vertical, lifting, etc.). ) and flexibility (such as skimming, pressing, hooking, etc. ), making the overall structure of Chinese characters both rigid and flexible; (3) Most of the existing Chinese characters are evenly distributed and have a stable and compact structure; ④ Most strokes of current Chinese characters are arranged smoothly and orderly; ⑤ There is a strong structural diversity in what the current Chinese characters write, because the current Chinese characters have a unique structure and compound structure, and the compound structure is divided into up and down, left and right, inclusive, semi-inclusive, mosaic and other categories, so that the chapters composed of Chinese characters are not monotonous at first glance; ⑥ The number of strokes of each word in the current Chinese characters is different, some are many, and some are few, so that the things written with the current Chinese characters have aesthetic feeling as a whole.
Nowadays, Chinese characters have a beautiful structure, which can be used as the carrier of calligraphy art, while other kinds of characters in the world can hardly become the carrier of calligraphy art. In addition, the author thinks that after Chinese characters are changed from traditional characters to simplified characters, the stroke density of each character is changed from too high to moderate, which further beautifies the structure of Chinese characters.
In fact, there are also a few existing Chinese characters whose structures are not beautiful. For example, there are too many strokes of the word "sunrise", and a horizontal line in the middle is not very smooth and unsightly; Another example is the uneven distribution of strokes of the word "Guang", which is unstable and unsightly as a whole.
10. The phonetic performance of the current Chinese character glyphs is very poor.
The phonetic performance of the current Chinese character glyphs is very poor, which is reflected in the following aspects: ① The most basic component of the current Chinese characters is strokes, not symbols representing sounds; (2) The vast majority of Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters, that is, they are composed of parts that represent sounds (sound and meaning surfaces) and parts that represent meanings (meaning surfaces). However, the relationship between the phonetic components of Chinese characters and the pronunciation of Chinese characters is very confusing, because the same pronunciation may correspond to multiple phonetic components, and the same phonetic component may correspond to multiple pronunciations, so the functions of these phonetic components to express the pronunciation of Chinese characters are weak, while the functions to mislead the pronunciation of Chinese characters are strong. You can analyze the Chinese characters that appear in this paragraph and how many Chinese characters are correctly pronounced by the sound side.
1 1. Now Chinese characters are monosyllabic.
At present, the pronunciation of Chinese characters is only one syllable, only one vowel, only one or two consonants, or even none.
12. There are few kinds of pronunciations of Chinese characters, and the pronunciation distribution is uneven.
At present, there are very few kinds of pronunciation of Chinese characters, only more than 400 kinds (regardless of tone), and the pronunciation distribution is uneven. For example, there are about 65,438+000 words with the sound of "one" and only one word with the sound of "give". Why are there so few kinds of Chinese pronunciation now? The reason is that the pronunciation of Chinese characters is only one syllable, and there are not many kinds of consonants and vowels that make up a single syllable of Chinese characters.
13. There are many homophones in Chinese characters.
At present, there are 7000 Chinese characters with only over 400 pronunciations, so there are 17 characters with different shapes, but each pronunciation is the same, that is, homophones (regardless of tone). Therefore, the meaning of Chinese pronunciation itself is vague. For example, we just hear the sound of money, and we don't know whether it is money, money, money or pliers. In contrast, the pronunciation of every word in many other languages is basically unique, and you can basically know what it means when you hear the pronunciation of a word.
14. There are many Chinese characters with similar pronunciation.
Although the pronunciations of some Chinese characters are different, they are very similar, such as Si and Yes, Mu and Mou, Frequency and Ping, Xue and Xie, Liu and Niu, Han and Xing, Hu and Hu.
15. Now Chinese characters have different pronunciation tones.
At present, the pronunciation of Chinese characters can be divided into tone, rising tone, falling tone and light tone. This, to a certain extent, increases the types of pronunciations of the current Chinese characters, making them cadence.
16. Vowels play an important role in the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
Except for a few modal particles, there are one or more vowels in the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and there is only one or no consonant before and after the vowel (you can count the number of vowels and consonants in the pronunciation of Chinese characters such as "Bi, Bian, Bing, De, Gu, Hui and Huan", and note that "ng" is pronounced as a consonant. Because vowels are clearer than consonants, vowels play a major role in the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Because vowels are pleasant sounds, Chinese characters are pleasant to read.
17. There are regional differences in the pronunciation of current Chinese characters.
Although the pronunciation of Chinese characters is fixed now, in fact, there are obvious differences among different places in the vast territory of China. This difference can be manifested in the differences of pronunciation, tone and tone.
18. The existing Chinese characters have certain ideographic functions.
Nowadays, a small part of Chinese characters are pictographs, knowing characters or herringbone. The words "wood", "stone", "day", "middle" and "well" have strong ideographic functions and are easy to learn and understand, which is convenient for improving reading comprehension. Nowadays, most Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters, and their meanings also have certain ideographic functions, such as "cancer", "election" and "sore", which are related to diseases at first glance, while "woman", "sister-in-law" and "elder sister" are related to women at first glance.
However, the ideographic function of current Chinese characters has some limitations, for the following reasons: ① it is difficult to express meaning with form; After thousands of years of evolution, some Chinese characters with good ideographic function have either changed their glyphs or changed their meanings, and their glyphs are no longer ideographic. In a word, there are many pictophonetic characters in Chinese characters, such as Niu in Te, Dong in Xing, Che in Ruan, Mi in Huo and Yu in Huo. There is no obvious correlation with its meaning.
19. Now Chinese characters are very free to form words and sentences.
Nowadays, Chinese characters are very free to form words and sentences. We often see words that are not in the dictionary, such as "seven sitting and eight crawling" (meaning that a baby can sit up in seven months and get up in eight months); I often see sentences wrapped in a thick layer, such as "I haven't eaten the moon cakes made in Guangzhou that the office bought from the supermarket before the Mid-Autumn Festival"; Sometimes, we also see the phenomenon of mixed writing and writing, such as "putting into practice", "keeping pace with the times" and "full of feelings".
These are the basic features of the current Chinese character 19.
Characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of current Chinese characters
From the above characteristics of the Chinese character 19, it can be concluded that the biggest feature of the current Chinese character is a square character composed of strokes that do not represent sound. We don't discuss the characteristics of pronunciation and meaning because we reform the existing Chinese characters not to change the pronunciation or meaning of Chinese characters, nor do we need to change the pronunciation or meaning of Chinese characters. The same is true when discussing the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese characters.
From the above characteristics of 19 Chinese characters, we can draw the following conclusions: ① rich cultural connotations; 2 beautiful; ③ The glyph signals are obviously concentrated and easy to read; ④ The glyph has certain ideographic function, which is convenient for reading and understanding.
From the above characteristics of Chinese character 19, it can be concluded that the shortcomings of current Chinese characters are that the font is difficult to remember and the phonetic expression of the font is very poor. There are many kinds of components in Chinese characters, and many Chinese characters are not easy to understand, so the glyphs of Chinese characters are difficult to remember. The most basic component of Chinese characters is strokes, not symbols representing sounds. In addition, most Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters, and there is great uncertainty in the relationship between their phonetic components and pronunciation, so the pronunciation of pictophonetic characters in Chinese characters is difficult to identify and easy to admit mistakes. You can take this passage as an example to find out how many words can be read from their glyphs.
In the final analysis, these two shortcomings are the problems of Chinese characters, that is to say, Chinese characters are not written in Pinyin. Because if a part of the current Chinese characters is formed according to Pinyin, the pictophonetic character of the font is very strong, and the shape or part of the shape of a word can be known by knowing the pronunciation of the word.
These two shortcomings lead to the following consequences:
First of all, they make Chinese characters very difficult to learn now (further analysis is made in Chapter 6 and Chapter 9). Almost everyone has a process of memorizing the writing, pronunciation and meaning of each word when learning Chinese characters now. This is very difficult. It is as difficult as remembering the looks (corresponding glyphs), names (corresponding pronunciations) and internal characteristics (corresponding meanings) of thousands of people. Some of these people have similar looks, some have similar names, and some have similar internal characteristics. They can't remember their accumulated efforts. I believe that there are some skills in learning Chinese characters nowadays, but these skills play a very limited role.
Secondly, they deprive children of many opportunities to learn Chinese characters by themselves. In modern society, children have many opportunities to contact Chinese characters. For example, there are all kinds of Chinese character signboards on the street, some Chinese character signs on household appliances and food, and many Chinese character subtitles on TV programs. If children know these words, or see their pronunciation from their glyphs, they can often understand the meaning of these words and the information expressed by these materials. These are undoubtedly opportunities for self-study of Chinese characters, and the above two shortcomings of current Chinese characters have made children lose many such opportunities for self-study.
Third, they lead to a large number of illiterate and semi-illiterate people in China for a long time, and the cultural quality of the people is low (note: the existence of a large number of illiterate people in China is the result of the interaction of historical, social, family and education factors, and the current difficulty in learning Chinese characters is one of the reasons).
Fourthly, they lead to many misreading and writing Chinese characters in society. For example, the word "fiery" is pronounced as "ambition", the word "sniper" is pronounced as "Z incarnation", and so on.
Fifth, they make it very difficult to input Chinese characters into typewriters, transmitters, computers and mobile phones. Now, through people's long-term efforts, although these difficulties have eased, they still exist.