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A Chinese character or Han character (Simplified Chinese: 汉字; Traditional Chinese: 漢字; pinyin: Hànzì) is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese, sometimes Korean, and formerly Vietnamese.
The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. Studies carried out in China have shown that full literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters.[1]
In Chinese tradition, each character corresponds to a single syllable. A majority of words in all modern varieties of Chinese are polysyllabic and thus require two or more characters to write. Cognates in the various Chinese languages/dialects which have the same or similar meaning but different pronunciations can be written with the same character. In addition, many characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. The loose relationship between phonetics and characters has thus made it possible for them to be used to write very different and probably unrelated languages.
Chinese characters are also known as sinographs, and the Chinese writing system as sinography. Non-Chinese languages which have adopted sinography — and, with the orthography, a large number of loanwords from the Chinese language — are known as Sinoxenic languages, whether or not they still use the characters. The term does not imply any genetic affiliation with Chinese. The major Sinoxenic languages are generally considered to be Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
While Chinese characters are often thought of as overly complex, in fact they are all derived from a couple hundred simple pictographs and ideographs in ways that are usually quite logical and easy to remember. These wen (or zigen) are the true radicals of Chinese as identified by Xu Shen in his classic Shuowen Jiezi nearly 2000 years ago. Xu Shen also devised the bushou, meaning "section headings", to help organize his dictionary into more manageable parts. With minor changes this bushou system has been the foundation of almost all subsequent Chinese dictionaries. Often mistranslated as "radicals", not all of the bushou are true radicals in that some of them can be further broken down into their component wen. Moreover, many of the true radicals are not included in the list of bushou.
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