How many characters are there in the ancient Chinese language?

Answer 1

There isn't a single Chinese language, the most widely spoken is Mandarin.

Written Mandarin doesn't use an alphabet, it uses a system of symbols - over 40,000 symbols are used.

During the 20th century, work on Simplified Chinese was started - making Manderin easier to write and reducing the number of symbols. This system reduces the number of symbols to a few thousand.

Answer 2

There are no letters in Chinese writing, but there are characters.

Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.

Answer 3

The number of different symbols, compared to writing systems based on an alphabet is incredibly high. Even smaller dictionaries contain as many as 6,000 different characters. The Kangxi dictionary published in 1710 contains some 47,000 characters. The Hanyu dacidian that came out recently in mainland China lists over 60,000 characters.

Of course, nobody can remember such a large number of symbols. Actually, there is no need to do that. An average Chinese person might be able to read about 4-5,000 characters which is sufficient to understand almost anything written in Chinese today. But just 3,000 characters constitutes over 90% of newspaper articles.

Answer 4

unlike English or French or Spanish or even Arabic, Chinese is a language without an alphabet.

Chinese is made up of a various of Chinese characters, most characters have meanings, some don't, like "吗 呀 吧 呢 哗". these characters are used for interrogative sentence without actual meaning in themselves.

a Chinese word could be made up of a single character, most of them are verbs like"打hit 走walk 骂scold", but most of Chinese words include 2 characters, for instance:"中国China 饮料beverage 人类human".

there're words that include characters up to four words, but they are normally idioms created by ancient Chinese.

for instance"

礼尚往来--Courtesy calls for reciprocity.

国泰民安--The country flourishes and people live in peace.

岁岁平安--Peace all year round.

Answer 5

Technically there are zero alphabets in Chinese, but the following two alphabets are used in some situations:

Pinyin (the Latin alphabet for Chinese)

Bopomofo (a native alphabet used as a teaching tool)

Answer 6

The Shuo Wen, the first "official" dictionary, had over 10,000

Answer 7

The standardised Chinese language of Mandarin uses characters; there is no alphabet.

Answer 8

There are not any characters.And 21 initials and 38 finals altogether.