Real Chinese - Mini-guides - Chinese characters

Is the same system of Chinese characters used around the world?

China is a vast country and regional Chinese dialects can sound as different to each other as English and German, but they are all written with the same system of Chinese characters. Chinese characters can help people speaking widely different dialects communicate effectively, because the writing system is meaning-based and not sound-based.

So while the word for ‘one’ in Mandarin is pronounced ‘yi’, and in Cantonese (the dialect spoken in Hong Kong) it is pronounced ‘yat’, they are both written with the same Chinese character: 一.

For a parallel of how this works in European languages, we can look at numbers.

‘One’ in English is ‘eins’ in German and ‘un’ in French, and yet these three different-sounding words can all be written using the same numeral: ‘1’.

The meaning of ‘1’ is the same in all three languages.

The difference in Chinese, of course, is that this principle holds true not just for numerals, but for words like ‘government’, ‘computer’ and ‘soup’.