What is the most complex Chinese character? (2024)

FAQs

What is the most complex Chinese character? ›

The most complex character, biáng (above), is made up of 57 strokes. This character occurs in the written form of biángbiáng miàn, or biangbiang noodles, a dish of wide, flat noodles popular in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. The status of biáng as most complex requires a bit of qualification.

Biáng – a type of noodle (42 strokes)

Biáng has attained a certain fame as the most complex Chinese character of them all. However, again there are a few issues surrounding it. The character has a very, very specific meaning: it is used in the name of a traditional Shaanxi noodle dish.

The Chinese character "biang" has more than 50 strokes and is believed to be one of the most complicated.

Huáng, with its incredible 172 strokes, is generally regarded as Chinese writing's most difficult character. It is shrouded in mystery, as scholars have tried to determine both its source and meaning. Some believe it is just a made-up or nonsense word.

The most complex character, biáng (above), is made up of 57 strokes. This character occurs in the written form of biángbiáng miàn, or biangbiang noodles, a dish of wide, flat noodles popular in the Chinese province of Shaanxi.

There are many variations of the character for biáng, but the most widely accepted version is made up of 58 strokes in its traditional form (42 in simplified Chinese). It is one of the most complex Chinese characters in modern usage, although it is not found in modern dictionaries or even in the Kangxi dictionary.

How many characters are there? Altogether there are over 50,000 characters, though a comprehensive modern dictionary will rarely list over 20,000 in use. An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but you will only need about 2-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper.

How many Chinese characters does the average Chinese know? It is estimated that well-educated Chinese adults would have an average vocabulary size of 8,000-10,000 Chinese characters. Meanwhile a typical high-school graduate would have learned around 4,500.

2.1 Left Falling (撇)

The left falling stroke (撇/piě) always starts at the top right and angles to bottom left as the brush leaves the paper. See the directional arrows in the outlined long and short left-falling strokes.

How many strokes does the average Chinese character have? ›

Since the average Chinese character has twelve strokes, and many characters have twenty or more strokes, it would be utterly impossible to input the thousands of different characters with just one stroke. You can find an index to the characters by total stroke count here. Here's a bilingual introduction to "Ibeezi".

If you mean the easiest Chinese character to write, it would be “yī” (一), which means “one”, although “èr” (二) and “sān” (三) are both easier to write.

The earliest known form of Chinese writing, according to archeologists, is called “jiaguwen” (甲骨文), or the oracle bone script. Jiaguwen can be traced back to the Chinese Bronze Age.

Mandarin Chinese

Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. Mandarin Chinese is challenging for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the writing system is extremely difficult for English speakers (and anyone else) accustomed to the Latin alphabet.

Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker.

Mandarin Chinese tops the list as the hardest language for English speakers due to its tonal pronunciations (4 tones), unique idioms, use of thousands of logographic characters, and lack of similarities to English.