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About This Quiz
Are you ready to take on all 50,000 Chinese characters? Well, don't worry, you don't need to learn them all. But if you can recognize the few featured in this quiz, you'll be well on your way to fluency!
You see, according to the experts, it takes knowledge of only 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese characters to be able to read the newspaper. It's the range in which you are considered fluent. Bump that number up to 8,000 characters and, well, you've just become a member of the highly educated class!
But regardless of how much you know, we have a feeling you'll score well on this quiz. You see, we want to show you that it doesn't have to be too daunting of a task to learn Chinese. The characters featured in this quiz are the "easy" ones - the ones that actually look like their meaning! So do you think you have what it takes to name them all correctly? Is your right brain ready to take on the "pictograms" and "ideograms" seen within these characters?
It's time to pack your bags and head out of the classroom. We're heading to the streets of China! Good luck and remember, sometimes the answer is drawn out right in front of your face!
Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Bear
Elephant
The written Chinese language is categorized as logographic. This means that a written character represents a word or phrase. Other logographic languages include Japanese and Korean.
Glass
Pitcher
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Tent
Canoe
Mountain
In Standard Chinese, the characters, or logograms, are called Hanzi. The literal meaning is "Han characters."
Tree
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Thirsty
Rain
Use of the Chinese characters in written language began during the Bronze Age and continues to present day. The Bronze Age came after the Stone Age and before the Iron Age.
Laundry
Car
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Wine
Chair
Umbrella
Over time, Chinese characters have taken on a simplified form. Traditional characters can be extremely detailed and intricate, while the simplified forms are less so.
Baseball bat
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Piano
Trumpet
Tree
Skewer
Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. They are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Forest
Did you know there are tens of thousands of Chinese characters? Most of them, however, are minor graphic variants from others.
Carpet
Puppy
Yarn
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
River
Cry
Studies have shown that if you were to learn three- or four-thousand Chinese characters, you would be functionally literate. In secondary schools, only a few thousand are actually taught!
Rain
Bath tub
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
River
Did you know that Old Chinese is also known as Archaic Chinese? It is the oldest attested stage of Chinese and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are on oracle bones from around 1250 B.C., in the late Shang dynasty.
Candle
Cantaloupe
Milk
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Cat
Dog
Horse
Bird
Modern Chinese has many homophones. This means that the same spoken syllable may be represented by many characters, depending on the meaning.
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Drive
Coffee
East
Did you know that in modern Chinese, characters do not necessarily correspond to words? Most Chinese words consist of two or more characters because of the merging and loss of sounds in the Chinese language over time.
Beach
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Foot
Mouth
It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables. The vast majority of those are considered disyllables - meaning they consist of two syllables!
Table
Flower
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Door
Many Chinese characters actually have multiple readings, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one-fifth of the 2,400 most common characters have multiple pronunciations. Confused yet?
Car
Sleep
Child
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Mountain
Monster
Sunrise
The Chinese characters in this quiz were developed through pictograms. A pictogram is created when the word is displayed through a pictorial representation of the object.
Moon
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Hot dog
Rice
Yogurt
Fire
The traditional six-fold classification of Chinese writing was first described by the scholar Xu Shen in the postface of his dictionary "Shuowen Jiezi" in the early second century.
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Pizza
Jacket
Briefcase
Burn
The book title Shuowen Jiezi, written by Xu Shen, translates to "Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters." It was an early 2nd-century Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty - the first of its kind to analyze the structure of Chinese characters.
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Candy
Forest
Turtle
According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor. Did you know that Yellow Emperor was also known as Huangdi and is considered a deity?
School
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Dragon
It is said that the Cangjie was inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the Earth and the stars in the sky. He is said to have invented symbols called zì – the first Chinese characters.
Parade
Store
Water
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Rabbit
Park
Claw
In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Neolithic sites in China. These include Jiahu, Dadiwan, Damaidi and Banpo.
Flag
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Prisoner
Did you know that the earliest confirmed evidence of Chinese writing was the inscriptions carved on oracle bones from the late Shang dynasty? In 1899, pieces of these bones were being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes when scholars identified the symbols on them as Chinese writing.
Kitchen
Lotion
Train
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Roof
Happy
Embarrassed
The earliest form of Chinese writing is known as Oracle bone script. Oracle bones were pieces of ox scapula or turtle plastron which were used for pyromancy, a form of divination, in ancient China.
Laughing
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Tree
Teacher
Three
The newest of the many versions of Chinese script is known as simplified Chinese script or regular script. It was developed by Zhong Yao during the Eastern Han dynasty.
Placemat
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Human
Zhong Yao was a government official and calligrapher who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms period of China. He is regarded as one of the Four Talented Calligraphers in the history of Chinese calligraphy.
Dish
Television
Tissue
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Restaurant
Up
Did you know that in modern times the People's Republic of China has issued several rounds of official Chinese character simplification? The first round came in 1956 and the second in 1964. By 1991, a single set of unified characters had been created.
Angry
Lantern
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Both
Ever heard of the CJK languages? That's the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages! In 1991, a single set of unified characters was completed for the purposes of Unicode.
Porch
Paper clip
Mouse
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What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Chips
Soup
Fish
Ever heard of Unicode? It is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text, expressed in most of the world's writing systems! It aims to unify characters from languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean and more.
Piano
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Two
Did you know that the People's Republic of China is the world's most populous country? There are about 1.4 BILLION people living on over 3.7 million square miles of land.
Forty
Gorilla
Books
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Rooster
Dog
Big
While the capital of China is Beijing, it's not the largest city. That honor belongs to the city of Shanghai.
Carton
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
One
Did you know that China is the world's largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods? Since 1978, the country has been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
Yellow
Photograph
Garage
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Hamster
Glass
Tiger
Did you know that China is a recognized nuclear weapons state? They also have the world's largest standing army and second-largest defense budget.
Hammer
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Candle
Mountain
Middle
Mandarin Chinese is spoken by about a billion people worldwide - more than any other language. This means that by learning Chinese you unlock the potential to speak to over 13% of the world’s total population.
Car
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Flower
Field
Did you know that there is a famous poem called "Shī shì shí shī shǐ" (The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den) in Chinese? It is comprised of 120 characters, all of which have the pronunciation “shi,” but with 5 different tones.
Climber
Chef
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Rabbit
Learning Chinese language, both spoken and script, can seem like a daunting task. The best practice, experts say, is to practice and interact with books and people every day - the rest will fall into place.
Carrot
Lettuce
Pepper
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Elevator
Down
Did you know that Chinese is the fastest-growing language in the world? It is also the fastest-growing second language in the West.
Movie
Popcorn
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Table
Sunrise
Sunset
King
The ability to speak, read and write Chinese requires use of both temporal lobes of the brain. This differs from English speakers, who only require use of the left side of the brain. Perhaps that's why English speakers have more difficulty learning Chinese!
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Umbrella
Moon
Did you know that Chinese was originally written from right to left in vertical columns? Today, the writing has changed to horizontal rows from left to right as is done in European languages.
Skewer
Bird
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Dragon
Knife
Chinese writers can choose from a set of 12 basic strokes to create the various characters. Some Chinese characters contain just one or two strokes, while others can contain up to 84 strokes.
Potato
Cheese
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Original
What is the meaning of these Chinese characters?
Sun
Although there are no spaces between characters in Chinese sentences, the writing system has adopted some basic punctuation since the late 19th century. For example, hollow circles mark the end of sentences and Western conventions such as the comma, exclamation point and question mark have been introduced.
Three
Seven
One hundred
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Elephant
Giraffe
Truck
Ear
Did you know that Simplified Chinese is the now the standard writing system for the People's Republic of Chine and Singapore? Traditional Chinese, however, continues to be the standard for Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau.
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Heart
Did you know that at the inception of written Chinese, spoken Chinese was monosyllabic? That means that Chinese words were usually one syllable.
Shower
Rain
River
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Original
What is the meaning of this Chinese character?
Claw
Turtle
Eye
Did you know that Chinese scripts are written in various calligraphic hands? These are known as the seal script, clerical script, regular script, semi-cursive script and cursive script.
Couch
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