I am new to Chinese and am wondering how it works to read texts. I read somewhere something like that Chinese characters can be pronounced multiple ways, or one pronunciation leads to multiple different characters (so when typing Chinese on a Latin keyboard, you have to select from a dropdown the character out of a list). Something like that...

This makes me wonder the following. If you have a Chinese text, i.e. just the characters and no Pinyin or anything, I'm wondering if it's possible to figure out the meaning of the text. This might be obvious but I'm a bit confused. I know you can't figure out the pronunciation from the characters alone, but maybe if you have a dictionary, you could look up the symbols to figure out their pronunciations. Wondering if that is possible, or if you instead need to have memorized the characters before trying to read a document.

Basically wondering if it's possible to reconstruct the Pinyin for the Chinese characters, just given the Chinese characters and a dictionary.



You would have some problem in there, because the translation of the characters alone aren't exactly the same as those when they appear together. A simple example:


If you just pick each character from a dictionary, you would get a translation like:

He [elder sister] [younger sister] be middle country person.

What meaning could you extract from that? I don't think nothing much close from the original one, which should be:

His sister is Chinese.

Since Chinese has no blank space in between words, it's hard to know when you are a beginer where the words start and finish. To start trying to understand the sentence above, you should first know that the words are:


Another problem is that many characters have more than one meaning. Taking my first example, if you didn't know that 中国 was a word itself and tried to find 中 alone, you could find 中 with the meanings "middle, to hit, China, etc.", making it more difficult to choose the correct one.

So, the answer to your question is: yes, it is possible, but you will have a hard time with it.


Basically, yes.

The number of characters that have multiple pronunciations are much less than those do not. In context, e.g. when you have a sentence or word instead of single character, the pronunciation of polyphony character would be fixed, and that pronunciation can be determined with a dictionary.

Chinese people would have already remembered the pronunciation of more than 99% percent of characters they might meet every day. So they would not need dictionary to help them most of the time.

If you meet a character you do not already know, and you do not have a dictionary, then it would be nearly impossible to know how to read it.

There are some exceptions, for example, when you meet a polyphony character in a person's given name. Then without asking the person, it might be hard to know the proper reading.

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