"In the last two months I have learned more using Clavis Sinica than I did in two years of college Chinese."
—Martin Colwell
"Big thanks for the software! I just started learning Chinese here at the UN,
and your program is just what I need. It lets me follow up what I
learn in the classroom and then explore further."
—Nikolai Galkin, United Nations
The Chinese Alphabet
The Chinese language has no alphabet. Or, to be more precise, the Chinese written language does not have an alphabet in the traditional sense of a set of letters that are combined to represent the sounds of words. The idea of the alphabet can be helpful, though, in understanding how Chinese characters are constructed. Just as a standard alphabet consists of a small number of letters that can be recombined to form a large number of words, so the "Chinese alphabet" consists of a (relatively) small number of structural elements that are recombined to form a much larger number of characters.
A typical Chinese character consists of two component parts, referred to as the radical and phonetic. The radical part often provides some indication of the meaning of the character, while the phonetic part often provides a clue as to the pronunciation of the character. The complete set of all the radicals (189 in simplified Chinese) and all the phonetics (several thousand) can be understood as forming something like a "Chinese alphabet."
While mastering this Chinese alphabet is obviously much more difficult than learning the 26 letters of the standard alphabet, understanding how radical and phonetic elements from the Chinese alphabet come together to form Chinese characters is very useful in learning to read or write Chinese.
Clavis Sinica is a powerful software tool designed to help you learn Chinese by showing how characters are constructed out of their radical and phonetic parts, and how these parts help to convey the meaning and sound of the character. By studying the structure of the characters and understanding the workings of the Chinese alphabet, you can progress much more quickly in learning to read and write Chinese.
Clavis Sinica Features for Learning the "Chinese Alphabet":
- Text Reader Window displays any Chinese text in clear, easy-to read format and provides one-click access to English translation of any Chinese character, word, or phrase.
- Character Information Window breaks characters into radical and phonetic parts for ease in learning and provides helpful lexical and usage frequency information for each character, and
- Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary of more than 37,000 entries includes over 4,000 characters and over 33,000 multi-character compound words, phrases, and idioms.
- Dictionary records for all entries include pinyin romanization(s) and concise English definition(s). For characters they also include stroke count, wuhua stroke order, radical and phonetic parts, frequency indicator, and (for 500 of the most common characters) etymological explanations.
- Powerful search functions permit searching the Chinese dictionary by character or compound pinyin, radical number, number and/or order of strokes, or English word or phrase