MANDARIN CHINESE SYMBOLS MEANINGSHere's a list of Chinese symbols meanings and pronunciations.
The characters shown to your right spell out the words "United States" in Mandarin Chinese, a language also known as standard spoken Chinese. The writing shown on this page is commonly referred to as "simplified Chinese." The Kangxi (Chinese) dictionary contains more than 47,000 characters, but most of these are rarely used. The average person fluent in the language only needs to know two or three thousand characters. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used writing system in the world. Legend has it that Chinese characters were invented by a man named Cangjie, sometime around 2650 BC. Other languages making use of Chinese characters include Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Most Chinese words are written using two or more Chinese characters. Chinese characters are modified pictures, more or less, but the symbolism behind these characters is not always clearly understood. According to one expert, the most complex Chinese character is the one that means "verbose." This word requires sixty-four strokes to complete, which is probably why it fell from common use around the 5th century AD. Romanization is often used for writing languages traditionally associated with Chinese characters. With romanization, words are spelled out phonetically, using our standard Roman alphabet. There are many Chinese-to-English dictionaries available online. Following a thorough search of these, here's a list of states, with corresponding Chinese symbols for each of them. Scroll down for a fascinating look at written Chinese symbols representing all fifty American states. For other symbolic representations of the United States, click any link at the bottom of this page.
CHINESE CHARACTERS - EASTERN ZODIAC
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