How to talk about Chinese characters in Chinese

How do native speakers talk about Chinese characters?

The writing system is not phonetic, so you can’t spell out words, but it is still possible to talk about Chinese characters.

Let’s explore how!

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How to talk about Chinese characters in Chinese

There are generally two challenges when talking about Chinese characters verbally:

1. How do you identify a specific character in the written language, using only spoken words? For example, if you hear someone say the word shìshí, “fact; truth”, how do you figure out which shì and shí are used when writing the word? The answer is 事实, which is easy to show in writing, but how do you do it when speaking?
2. How do you describe how a certain character is written? For example, if someone tells you it is the same shí as in zhēnshí (真实), but you do not know how to write this character, how do you figure this out, again, sticking only to spoken Mandarin?

For new learners, it might not be obvious why these are problems. Talking about words in English is simple after all; you just need to spell out the words. Spelling “rhythm” might be tricky, but it is not hard to talk about.

You can’t spell out a Chinese character

Chinese is different. For basic characters, such as 人, 火 or 山, there is no link between the written characters and the spoken language. You just need to learn how they are pronounced, just like you cannot tell from looking at the numeral “3” that it is pronounced /θri/ in English.

The building blocks of Chinese, part 2: Basic characters, components and radicals

For compound characters, the problem is slightly different. There are many hundreds of commonly used components, but since many of them have overlapping pronunciations, there is no simple way to point to a specific one.

The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters

How native speakers talk about Chinese characters

So, how do native speakers talk about Chinese characters, then?

That is what this article is about. The goal is to enable you to communicate with Chinese people about characters without relying on visual support.

This is very useful, especially when you are learning the language.

Identifying a specific Chinese character through spoken words

When you want someone to think of a specific character, such as one of the characters in your name, you need to give them clues. If your clues are good, there is only one possible answer, and you are done.

Your Chinese name is a good example, because even native speakers might not be able to guess what characters you use to write it. When introducing themselves, it is very common for native speakers to talk about the characters in their names to clarify which characters are used.

Show which character you mean by including it in a common word

The most common way of identifying a specific character is to include the character in a common word. While there are many, many characters that are pronounced the same way, longer words are more unique. By referring to a word, you remove any risk of ambiguity, and the listener knows which character you are talking about.

For example, if you want to say that your family name is 王 (wáng) and not 黄 (huáng), you can simply say that it is guówáng de wáng (国王 的 王), or “the wáng in the word guówáng“. This avoids any ambiguity, as there is only one word pronounced guówáng.

Here is the general formula, where X is the character you want to talk about and Y is just another character that forms a common word with X:

• YX 的 X (guówáng de wáng, 国王 的 王)
• XY 的 X (zhēnshí de zhēn, 真实 的 真)

For example, here is one way of helping people identify my Chinese family name:

• 凌晨 的 凌

So, I am saying that it is the líng in língchén (凌晨, “early morning”). This helps people identify the right character and also avoids confusion with another surname, 林, which is much more common and is pronounced in a similar way: lín.

There are no fixed rules for what clues you give, so whatever works is fine. There are, however, some very common patterns, and while you do not have to use them, it is good to be aware of them.

For example, 林 is a very common surname, and the character is often called shuāngmù lín, 双木林 (the lín that has two 木 in it). Characters that actually have names like this are not very common, though, and are mostly limited to names.

Here is another example; see if you can guess what common family name it refers to: mùzǐ lǐ.

Describing how a certain Chinese character is written

The above methods are very common among native speakers when identifying characters. For them, the task is merely to figure out which character it is, not how that character is written (they already know that).

For second language learners, it is practical to be able to discuss how individual characters are written without writing them down. This is useful for native speakers too when they encounter rare characters, perhaps in names as suggested above. What do you do if there are no common words, for example?

Describing characters stroke by stroke is rarely a good idea

Some teachers insist on teaching students the names of all the individual strokes. Thus, in theory, you could describe how a character is written simply by listing all the strokes in order.

I strongly dislike this approach. As a beginner, you have a ton of useful words to learn, so learning the names of brush strokes is a waste of time. Native speakers almost never refer to specific strokes in daily conversations, either, so learning the names does not help much.

Should you learn the names of the strokes in Chinese characters?

Describing Chinese characters by identifying their components

Instead, the best way to describe how characters are written is to identify the components that comprise them.

This does not really work for complete beginners since you need to know some components first, but I do not think complete beginners should spend time learning how to describe written words orally anyway.

You can identify a component either by directly naming it (all the common radicals have colloquial names, for instance) or by referring to another character that shares the same component (“the bottom part of this character”, “the left part of that character”).

This is actually similar to what we did with words above, but now we are looking inside individual characters.

Here are a few examples of colloquial names of radicals:

• 单人旁 dānrénpáng（亻）
• 提手旁 tíshǒupáng（扌）
• 三点水 sāndiǎnshuǐ（氵）
• 走之旁 zǒuzhīpáng（⻌）

Some have several versions:

• 竖心旁 shùxīnpáng（忄）
• 心字底 xīnzìdǐ（心）
• 竖心底 shùxīndǐ（⺗）

In my list of the 100 most commonly used radicals, I have included all the colloquial names.

Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals

Not all components have colloquial names, though, and even if they do, you might not know them. In such cases, you can fall back on general descriptions.

For example, here is how you could describe some of the components above without relying on the colloquial names:

• 亻: nǐ de zuǒbiān（你 的 左边）
• 扌: dǎ de zuǒbiān（打 的 左边）
• ⺗: mù de xiàmiàn（慕 的 下面）

This might work fine in some cases, but you can still run into problems. The first two are probably clear enough, but simply saying mù is not specific (there are many mù, including the 木 “tree” we looked at earlier). To avoid confusion, you probably need to say 羡慕 的 慕.

Naturally, the more characters you know, the more useful this method becomes. It does not help much when someone says “the bottom part of X” if X is a character you have never heard of.

It is also worth noting that some characters are genuinely hard to describe, even for native speakers, so do not expect this method to work in every situation.

Sometimes, using your phone or writing the character in some other way is your best option.

Challenge: Guess the correct character

To wrap up this article, let us play a guessing game.

What follows are descriptions of characters written in Pinyin. If someone said this to you, would you be able to guess what character the person was talking about? The answers here are all beginner-friendly, although the description might not be.

1. zuǒbiān yígè nǚ, yòubiān yígè zǐ
2. liǎng diǎn shuǐ jiā yígè shuǐ
3. fāngkuàngpáng lǐmiàn yígè yù

And a few that refer to other characters (some of these are not beginner-friendly):

1. yígè bìngqiě de bìng, jiā yígè wǎsī de wǎ
2. yígè huǒ jiā yígè jiǎyǐbǐngdīng de dīng
3. yígè jīnzìpáng, yígè zhēnshí de zhēn

If you believe you have the correct answer, please leave a comment. You can also check the comment section if you want to find the answers!

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2016, was rewritten and republished in November 2025.