<p>You can only detect word boundaries by the context and your vocabulary. If you don't know words many enough or the situation at hand much enough, there isn't much other way to ensure you understand the things correctly.</p>

<p>The reason that Chinese doesn't have word boundaries is that there are "character boundaries". In English, the basic unit of the lexicon, called a lexeme, is one word separated by spaces or punctuation. In Chinese, the lexeme is one Chinese character, so rather than having separated words, it is easy to distinguish different characters in a sentence. However, the hard part is that many Chinese words are actually multi-character words, much like multi-word terms / phrasal verbs in English. If English were to use multi-word terms as frequently as does Chinese use multi-character words, new English learners will find it equally hard to learn English.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T16:24:57.183Z
English has bazillions of compound items that take on meanings of their own, and, yes, that makes English (and many? all? other languages) difficult to learn. To quote from [Lexical Limits?](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22668) on LanguageLog: "what sorts of things [are words]? Once you have dog, do you treat dogs as a separate word? Presumably not. But how about doggy, dogging, dogged? If you have food as well as dog, is dog food (or dogfood) a separate word? Or hotdog, the food or the skiing style? What about idiomatic phrases like dog's breakfast?"
flow
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T17:27:30.850Z
@flow Yes English also has many compound items, but if you compare, Chinese uses them much more frequently, that is, aside affixes. However I agree that English still suffers from ambiguity, though IMHO the "compound item" factor is less important than in Chinese and the order of modifiers is a more common factor.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-31T12:38:11.093Z
It seems wrong to me to claim that lexemes are 1 Chinese character. It may have been true in some distant past (and even then, it was not entirely true anyway, there's plenty of polysyllabic words found in Classical Chinese texts), the average lexeme length in Mandarin is far above 1 syllable.
Perhaps you meant morpheme, that would be closer to reality.
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-31T13:46:36.407Z
@vermillon I didn't mean morpheme though. I understand that most characters can be morphemes themselves, yet composing words with more than one character can give new meanings and make the whole thing 1 morpheme, like how English idioms can be considered 1 morpheme. Also I don't see any problem in using most characters alone, as in 1-character words. It might make things harder to understand and probably very ambiguous, but the sentence should still be valid. That said, can you please suggest a term closer to what I wanted to say? I guess I'll really need to learn that.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T12:05:46.137Z
@busukxuan: A "morpheme" is the smallest unit of meaning. Combining 2 morphemes does not make a new morpheme, by definition. It can make a new word, a radical, whatever the case happens to be. If you take the word "werewolf", it has 2 morphemes, its meaning is different from both morphemes, it's a new word with a specific meaning, but it's not a single-morpheme word.
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T12:05:50.193Z
On the topic of "every character can be used alone", this is not true. You can *write* really contrived sentences that make use of it, and people will understand what you wrote (just because of the semantic load of characters), but that doesn't mean that if you *spoke* the sentence anyone would understand you. Try using 蜘 on its own and see who's going to understand. If your sentence can't be understood (despite an easy syntax), I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that sentence is good.
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T12:07:23.620Z
The character segmentation of Chinese is really a thing inherited from the past and doesn't really fit the modern language. As you say, the only way to learn boundaries is vocabulary and habit. (but that doesn't justify the writing system, even if we all get used to it)
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T18:43:18.890Z
@vermillon I am aware that combining 2 morphemes doesn't make a new morpheme, I am saying you can't break it down to 2 morphemes anymore. Maybe I'm going too far offshore, using some fringe concepts, I guess I should just stick with the mainstream. Also, I don't thing every character can be used alone. AFAIK 蜘 cannot be used by itself, but 蛛 can. The former is probably a cranberry morpheme, just a guess. The reason nobody would understand that is that they don't expect people to use this and there are similar sounding words that are more likely to be used.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T18:48:00.373Z
I also wouldn't say the sentence is good either, but that doesn't mean it breaks grammar. I agree that it's inherited from the past and stuff, because polysyllabic words are so much more common today.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T11:05:14.717Z
2016-01-30T11:05:14.717Z
busukxuan
<p>Today over at <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23754" rel="nofollow">LanguageLog</a>, I came across this sentence:</p>

<p>台灣經驗不僅是對其他開發中國家的一種啟發，更是台灣免於赤化的最佳保障。</p>

<p>Inadvertently, when scanning that phrase I ran down a gardenpath (yes, that's what linguists call it: a fruitless attempt that turns out to be the wrong choice, so you have to back up). Turns out it's not 開發　中國(家) *"develop China's (state)??", but, rather, 開發中　國家 "in-development states" (i.e. "developing countries"). </p>

<p>Such things will happen and happen again to the reader, and if you care to know more, head over to said site and google it for 'gardenpaths', there's lots of examples for a number of languages. Just the other day I realized German "Maisturm" is ambiguous: is it "Mais-Turm" (maize/corn tower) or "Mai-Sturm" (May tempest)? Probably the latter in most cases, but only context can tell. </p>

<p>I remember some of the beginner's textbooks for Chinese using spaces between words, so I guess you'll still be able to find some. As for why spaces are not normally used in Chinese and Japanese (but in Korean), one can only guess that people find them too unsightly, not really needed and maybe too big a change from what they're used to. </p>

<p>Also, while extra spaces might benefit the reader, they do put a burden on the writer (try to add them while staying consistent—it's not easy!).</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T11:10:37.423Z
Korean is another case, Korean lexemes can span many blocks, such as Korean native word **다르다** meaning **different**, whereas Chinese loanword **이** (异, trad:異) of the same meaning is indeed a single-block lexeme. Korean uses spaces as lexeme separators, and Chinese uses characters' block structures as lexeme separators.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T16:18:09.030Z
When you say 'lexeme', I take it that you mean 'morpheme'. Yi4 異 is not a 'lexeme'/'word' b/c it's not used by itself (in Ch. at least), only in compounds (異讀, 異國...). There are lots of polysyllabic morphemes in Ch., eg 蝴蝶, 葡萄, 蜘蛛, 蟑螂.... Ch. does have many monosyllabic morphemes & words, but a similar fact is true of English and, I think, Korean. It's hard to tell what a 'word' *is*, but we *can* say that in 開發中國家 there are at least 開發, 開發中, 開發中國, 中國, 國家 as candidates for recurring compounds with meanings that can't 100% be predicted from the meanings of their components.
flow
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-30T17:21:35.777Z
The Chinese 異 can be used by itself, only that it's uncommon nowadays. In your examples, 蝶、蛛、螂 can all stand alone. By the way,  I was originally talking about the Hanja 異 rather than the Chinese 異. In Korean spacing is used to separate lexemes(or wrong term again?), not morphemes. Back to the example I gave, **다르다**  actually contains 2 morphemes: the root **다르-** and suffix **-다** that implies either the propositive or the declarative voice, but  there is no spacing between them. That's why I said spacing is used to separate lexemes.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-31T12:47:49.117Z
"In Korean spacing is used to separate lexemes(or wrong term again?)" =>yes, wrong. A lexeme would be, roughly speaking, the set (meaning you can't call something "a lexeme") of forms you would group under 1 dictionary entry: {kill, kills, killing, killed,...} is 1 lexeme, whose lemma (the form you'll find as the dictionary entry) is "kill". It happens to also be a single morpheme word, but that's a coincidence in this case.
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-31T13:38:10.923Z
@vermillon I know a lexeme is a set of forms, and please excuse my wrong usage of terminology, does this mean I have to say "to separate elements of lexemes"? It sounds weird. Is there a better way to say that?
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T11:55:40.687Z
@busukxuan : I feel saying "words" would be just fine. Or do you think it's incorrect?
vermillon
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T12:13:20.437Z
@vermillon I really wanted to use that word, but then in the case of Chinese I would want to use "characters" instead, so it didn't full encompass what I wanted to say. Anyway thanks for the suggestion.
busukxuan
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-06-22T02:47:57.507Z
Got inspired to add garden-path detection functionality on the Chinese words separator Chrome extension. Example output based on this answer:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/npuqf6/chinese_words_separator/
Michael Buen
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-29T16:39:43.073Z
2016-01-29T16:39:43.073Z
flow
<p>Chinese does not use a word separator. How a novice learner can detect the word's boundaries? </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-29T06:32:51.973Z
You can check for verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns, conjunctions etc. that you know, there are some that are very common (eg 去 [v]，好 [adj]，很 [adv]，昨天 [n].) Once you know your sentence structure, you'll know what comes after that verb should be a noun, even if you don't know what that word is. Unfortunately, there's not much else you can do. Hint: words are more often one to two characters. Not as often three or four.
Ming
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-29T11:50:38.200Z
You need to build vocabulary and understand the context.
imrek
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-29T15:23:28.230Z
@Ming Is space used as a word separator at least to teach the languages to beginner? I'm although curious why they do not use word separator? Is it really useless for native speaker?
Real Dreams
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-29T16:54:51.333Z
@PHPst In Chinese script space is not commonly used, but if your textbook has Pinyin transliterations parallel to the original text, then the Pinyin subs are separated along word boundaries. A possible exception are children's books.
imrek
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-02-01T02:19:58.323Z
What @DrunkenMaster said :) I guess the typical path is learn pinyin, increase vocabulary, learn some grammar, learn some vocabulary with characters, rinse and repeat last two.
Ming
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-21T02:01:00.773Z
If you are using computer, you can use tools that can separate words to help you quickly accumulate words to your vocabulary

A tool I build: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chinese-words-separator/gacfacdpfimbkgcnlegknnmcccjgcbnp
Michael Buen
<word>
How to determine the end of words?
# How to determine the end of words?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2016-01-29)

Chinese does not use a word separator. How a novice learner can detect the word's boundaries?

**Tags:** word

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: You can check for verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns, conjunctions etc. that you know, there are some that are very common (eg 去 [v]，好 [adj]，很 [adv]，昨天 [n].) Once you know your sentence structure, you'll know what comes after that verb should be a noun, even if you don't know what that word is. Unfortunately, there's not much else you can do. Hint: words are more often one to two characters. Not as often three or four.  
> **username_2**: You need to build vocabulary and understand the context.  
> **username_0**: @username_1 Is space used as a word separator at least to teach the languages to beginner? I'm although curious why they do not use word separator? Is it really useless for native speaker?  
> **username_2**: @PHPst In Chinese script space is not commonly used, but if your textbook has Pinyin transliterations parallel to the original text, then the Pinyin subs are separated along word boundaries. A possible exception are children's books.  
> **username_1**: What @DrunkenMaster said :) I guess the typical path is learn pinyin, increase vocabulary, learn some grammar, learn some vocabulary with characters, rinse and repeat last two.  
> **username_3**: If you are using computer, you can use tools that can separate words to help you quickly accumulate words to your vocabulary  A tool I build: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chinese-words-separator/gacfacdpfimbkgcnlegknnmcccjgcbnp  

---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2016-01-30. Score: 4 | Accepted answer

You can only detect word boundaries by the context and your vocabulary. If you don't know words many enough or the situation at hand much enough, there isn't much other way to ensure you understand the things correctly.

The reason that Chinese doesn't have word boundaries is that there are "character boundaries". In English, the basic unit of the lexicon, called a lexeme, is one word separated by spaces or punctuation. In Chinese, the lexeme is one Chinese character, so rather than having separated words, it is easy to distinguish different characters in a sentence. However, the hard part is that many Chinese words are actually multi-character words, much like multi-word terms / phrasal verbs in English. If English were to use multi-word terms as frequently as does Chinese use multi-character words, new English learners will find it equally hard to learn English.

> **Comments:**
> **username_5**: English has bazillions of compound items that take on meanings of their own, and, yes, that makes English (and many? all? other languages) difficult to learn. To quote from [Lexical Limits?](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22668) on LanguageLog: "what sorts of things [are words]? Once you have dog, do you treat dogs as a separate word? Presumably not. But how about doggy, dogging, dogged? If you have food as well as dog, is dog food (or dogfood) a separate word? Or hotdog, the food or the skiing style? What about idiomatic phrases like dog's breakfast?"  
> **username_4**: @username_5 Yes English also has many compound items, but if you compare, Chinese uses them much more frequently, that is, aside affixes. However I agree that English still suffers from ambiguity, though IMHO the "compound item" factor is less important than in Chinese and the order of modifiers is a more common factor.  
> **username_6**: It seems wrong to me to claim that lexemes are 1 Chinese character. It may have been true in some distant past (and even then, it was not entirely true anyway, there's plenty of polysyllabic words found in Classical Chinese texts), the average lexeme length in Mandarin is far above 1 syllable. Perhaps you meant morpheme, that would be closer to reality.  
> **username_4**: @username_6 I didn't mean morpheme though. I understand that most characters can be morphemes themselves, yet composing words with more than one character can give new meanings and make the whole thing 1 morpheme, like how English idioms can be considered 1 morpheme. Also I don't see any problem in using most characters alone, as in 1-character words. It might make things harder to understand and probably very ambiguous, but the sentence should still be valid. That said, can you please suggest a term closer to what I wanted to say? I guess I'll really need to learn that.  
> **username_6**: @username_4: A "morpheme" is the smallest unit of meaning. Combining 2 morphemes does not make a new morpheme, by definition. It can make a new word, a radical, whatever the case happens to be. If you take the word "werewolf", it has 2 morphemes, its meaning is different from both morphemes, it's a new word with a specific meaning, but it's not a single-morpheme word.  
> **username_6**: On the topic of "every character can be used alone", this is not true. You can *write* really contrived sentences that make use of it, and people will understand what you wrote (just because of the semantic load of characters), but that doesn't mean that if you *spoke* the sentence anyone would understand you. Try using 蜘 on its own and see who's going to understand. If your sentence can't be understood (despite an easy syntax), I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that sentence is good.  
> **username_6**: The character segmentation of Chinese is really a thing inherited from the past and doesn't really fit the modern language. As you say, the only way to learn boundaries is vocabulary and habit. (but that doesn't justify the writing system, even if we all get used to it)  
> **username_4**: @username_6 I am aware that combining 2 morphemes doesn't make a new morpheme, I am saying you can't break it down to 2 morphemes anymore. Maybe I'm going too far offshore, using some fringe concepts, I guess I should just stick with the mainstream. Also, I don't thing every character can be used alone. AFAIK 蜘 cannot be used by itself, but 蛛 can. The former is probably a cranberry morpheme, just a guess. The reason nobody would understand that is that they don't expect people to use this and there are similar sounding words that are more likely to be used.  
> **username_4**: I also wouldn't say the sentence is good either, but that doesn't mean it breaks grammar. I agree that it's inherited from the past and stuff, because polysyllabic words are so much more common today.  

---

### Answer by username_5 on 2016-01-29. Score: 4

Today over at [LanguageLog](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23754), I came across this sentence:

台灣經驗不僅是對其他開發中國家的一種啟發，更是台灣免於赤化的最佳保障。

Inadvertently, when scanning that phrase I ran down a gardenpath (yes, that's what linguists call it: a fruitless attempt that turns out to be the wrong choice, so you have to back up). Turns out it's not 開發　中國(家) \*"develop China's (state)??", but, rather, 開發中　國家 "in-development states" (i.e. "developing countries").

Such things will happen and happen again to the reader, and if you care to know more, head over to said site and google it for 'gardenpaths', there's lots of examples for a number of languages. Just the other day I realized German "Maisturm" is ambiguous: is it "Mais-Turm" (maize/corn tower) or "Mai-Sturm" (May tempest)? Probably the latter in most cases, but only context can tell.

I remember some of the beginner's textbooks for Chinese using spaces between words, so I guess you'll still be able to find some. As for why spaces are not normally used in Chinese and Japanese (but in Korean), one can only guess that people find them too unsightly, not really needed and maybe too big a change from what they're used to.

Also, while extra spaces might benefit the reader, they do put a burden on the writer (try to add them while staying consistent—it's not easy!).

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: Korean is another case, Korean lexemes can span many blocks, such as Korean native word **다르다** meaning **different**, whereas Chinese loanword **이** (异, trad:異) of the same meaning is indeed a single-block lexeme. Korean uses spaces as lexeme separators, and Chinese uses characters' block structures as lexeme separators.  
> **username_5**: When you say 'lexeme', I take it that you mean 'morpheme'. Yi4 異 is not a 'lexeme'/'word' b/c it's not used by itself (in Ch. at least), only in compounds (異讀, 異國...). There are lots of polysyllabic morphemes in Ch., eg 蝴蝶, 葡萄, 蜘蛛, 蟑螂.... Ch. does have many monosyllabic morphemes & words, but a similar fact is true of English and, I think, Korean. It's hard to tell what a 'word' *is*, but we *can* say that in 開發中國家 there are at least 開發, 開發中, 開發中國, 中國, 國家 as candidates for recurring compounds with meanings that can't 100% be predicted from the meanings of their components.  
> **username_4**: The Chinese 異 can be used by itself, only that it's uncommon nowadays. In your examples, 蝶、蛛、螂 can all stand alone. By the way,  I was originally talking about the Hanja 異 rather than the Chinese 異. In Korean spacing is used to separate lexemes(or wrong term again?), not morphemes. Back to the example I gave, **다르다**  actually contains 2 morphemes: the root **다르-** and suffix **-다** that implies either the propositive or the declarative voice, but  there is no spacing between them. That's why I said spacing is used to separate lexemes.  
> **username_6**: "In Korean spacing is used to separate lexemes(or wrong term again?)" =>yes, wrong. A lexeme would be, roughly speaking, the set (meaning you can't call something "a lexeme") of forms you would group under 1 dictionary entry: {kill, kills, killing, killed,...} is 1 lexeme, whose lemma (the form you'll find as the dictionary entry) is "kill". It happens to also be a single morpheme word, but that's a coincidence in this case.  
> **username_4**: @username_6 I know a lexeme is a set of forms, and please excuse my wrong usage of terminology, does this mean I have to say "to separate elements of lexemes"? It sounds weird. Is there a better way to say that?  
> **username_6**: @username_4 : I feel saying "words" would be just fine. Or do you think it's incorrect?  
> **username_4**: @username_6 I really wanted to use that word, but then in the case of Chinese I would want to use "characters" instead, so it didn't full encompass what I wanted to say. Anyway thanks for the suggestion.  
> **username_3**: Got inspired to add garden-path detection functionality on the Chinese words separator Chrome extension. Example output based on this answer:  https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/npuqf6/chinese_words_separator/  

---

