What's the deal with Chinese characters?

 Chinese characters have this mystique about them. You see them emblazoned on T-shirts and there are unfortunate people who get tattoos with characters with...interesting meanings. Today I'm going to pull back the curtain and explain a little bit about how they work. Chinese characters are central to Journey to the Middle Kingdom. Jason, Sabrina, and Michelle are each given a magical calligraphy brush that whenever you write a Chinese character in the air, whatever you write, becomes real. Here they are in action:

Here Sabrina is using her brush to write the character for "Light" which, as you can see, has quite the effect on the monsters that were chasing them! The key thing here, is that the character is connected to its meaning, not its pronunciation.

To anyone who speaks English or any other language with an alphabet, this is a weird idea. In English we have letters which make sounds, and we combine the letters to make words. Of course in English the spelling and the pronunciation don't always follow the same pattern, but the main idea is there. There are tons of other languages that use the same strategy, Spanish, German, Russian, Korean, you name it. 

Chinese on the other hand is written with characters, and each character has some concept or idea associated with it. So that means whenever you see the character 光 then the meaning is always "light." The cool thing about this is anyone else who uses Chinese characters can understand the meaning. Japanese people use Chinese characters as part of their writing system. A Japanese person would look at the character 光 and pronounce it as "hikari" whereas a Chinese person would look at the same character and say "guang." Not even close to similar right? But even though the pronunciation is totally different, when it's written, a Japanese person and a Chinese person could understand.

In the comic the main characters will have to increase their knowledge of written Chinese to use their powers. And hopefully after reading this, you've leveled up yourself!