That means that documents like Bank Statements need different methods to estimate workloads. It does not include things like numbers and English words.Īs we can see, the Asian character count only gives the number of Asian characters, and does not include the numbers. In Word, for Chinese documents, “Asian characters, Korean words” gives the number of Chinese characters. For example in Word, we can easily see the number of Asian characters by selecting the word count tool: Most software programs will make this rather easy. Normally, the easiest solution is to calculate the number of characters instead. That means that calculating how many “words” are in a Chinese document can be difficult. These characters are usually referred to as bound phrases in Chinese linguistics. There are also characters which don’t generally get used by themselves but only in combination with other characters, an example might be “达” – “da” which combines with other characters to make words like “达到” which means “to arrive”. For example “北京” – “beijing” is the name of the city of Beijing. There are also cases where one word is made from several characters. Sometimes, one single character represents a particular word, for example “大” pronounced “da” means “big, or large”. Chinese characters have been fixed for many years, and cannot be changed without creating confusion. However, we cannot randomly or creatively add other parts to an established character to change the meaning like we could with English letters (we could add -ism on the end of anything to imply the ideology associated with it, Marx – Marxism). This is not true of Chinese, while some characters do look a bit like other characters, for example 鸣 (ming) looks a lot like the above character for bird, but with that extra square, and means the sound which animals (not just birds) make, sometimes translated as squawks. In English we can simply add the letter s to the word apple, for example, to make a plural, referring to more than one apple. So it’s tempting to think of strokes as being analogous to letters in English, but they are absolutely not. The character for one is composed of one single stroke, and the character for bird is composed of five strokes. A more technical definitionįor a more precise idea we can take the very technical definition given in “ The Chinese Lexicon: A Comprehensive Survey” by Yip Po-Ching, which states that: “ in Chinese is a graphic form composed of a number of strokes and confided to a square shaped area.” (). In this article I’m going to talk about the Chinese characters used to display modern standard Mandarin. In some languages, the word “symbol” or “sign” is taken to mean “character”, but in English, the correct word should always be “character”, not “letter”, “sign”, “symbol” or any other equivalent. They can be found in Vietnam, Korea, Japanese and other parts of the world. Chinese characters have a very long history and have evolved and spread forming the basis for many writing systems in Asia (just like how many European languages use words derived from Latin or Ancient Greek). A Chinese character (or a “汉字”, “Hanzi” in Chinese) is a written character used to represent meaning. How do we count Chinese characters? Simple Definition of Chinese charactersīefore we learn to count Chinese characters, let’s start by defining them.
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