Properties of the Chinese Orthography The orthographic structure of Chinese can be considered from three levels: characters, components, and strokes. Characters can be subdivided into simple and compound characters.
Homophones Chinese characters are monosyllabic, which means each character corresponds to one syllable. Unlike most other languages that are discrete in pronunciation,
Chinese Character Semantics There exist 210 semantic components that are used for dictionary look-up and classification of characters, and each semantic component forms on average 20 composite semantic-phonetic characters,
Mandarin, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional and Cantonese In most parts of Mainland China, people use the simplified scripts of Chinese characters, whereas in some other regions like Hong Kong and Taiwan, the traditional script of Chinese characters remains in the mainstream.
Chinese Character Hanyu Pinyin The pronunciation of Chinese Mandarin characters follows the official phonetic system called Pinyin which transcribes characters into the Latin alphabet.
Chinese Character Phonological Factors Phonetic components vary in regularity of correspondence between their sound value and that of the whole character, and this correspondence regularity for a given character and its phonogram is known as phonological regularity.
