Chinese Chemistry
Posted: 2025-09-14
Note: I've only taken Chemistry for two years so inaccuracies may appear. I'm only accepting corrections in factual errors. I don't care if you have a different opinion.
I have a lot to yap about how learning Chemistry in Chinese is just. A lot better than learning it in English. It makes a lot of things more intuitive and therefore the entire subject easier. And it's not just because Chinese is my native language — I have native-level proficiency in English too and I'm not letting anyone tell me otherwise.
I started Chemistry in ninth grade when the entire thing was taught in Chinese. When I went to high school, I took an Honors Chemistry course that was still mostly in Chinese but the teacher also made us know all the English to prepare for AP Chemistry. (I never took AP Chem. I did CCC and got silver. Fuck them.) And that was when the contrast became really clear to me.
If I spoke fluent Latin, I suppose I would've found English Chemistry easy too? But I don't speak Latin so I can't know.
Starting from the periodic table of elements. With Chinese, not only is every element one character and therefore one syllable, but also the characters are designed so you can know some things about the element just by looking at the character. For example:
- Every element that has 钅 on the left is a metal (with the "exception" of 金 (gold), which is literally just 钅). All the others are non-metals (with the exception of 汞 (mercury), which I'll talk about below).
- Every element that has 气 on the top is a gas at room temperature. Like 氢 (hydrogen), 氧 (oxygen), and every noble gas.
- Every element with 石 on the left is a solid at room temperature. Like 硅 (Silicon).
- Two elements are liquids at room temperature. The non-metal 溴 (bromine), and the metal 汞 (mercury). They both have 水 (water) in their characters (氵 is just water).
Other than the "type indicator" part, the other part of the character indicates pronunciation, so it's easy to pronounce it immediately. For example, 硒, the non-metal that's solid at room temperature, is pronounced the same as 西 (xī) (without the 石), despite looking a lot like 晒 (shài) which made a lot of people pronounce it wrong, LMAO.
If I remember correctly the chemists are also the only people with that special privilege to make new characters in the modern day. Like actually get them onto the dictionary and all that, for every new element discovered. But in the meantime I wonder what's the point of making all these new elements when none of them are going to exist for more than a millisecond or something like that. But whatever.
Then comes the inorganic compounds. None of those stupidly confusing number prefixes (monoxide vs. dioxide… why not bioxide?) because the numbers are literally one, two, three, etc.. To name a compound, simply take its chemical formula and read it backwards. For example, carbon monoxide () would be "one oxygen compounded with carbon" (一氧化碳), and carbon dioxide () would be "two oxygen compounded with carbon" (二氧化碳). There are, of course, exceptions[1], like hydrogen peroxide () being "too much oxygen compounded with hydrogen" (过氧化氢).
Salts are named similarly. Sodium chloride () is "chlorine compounded with sodium" (氯化钠).
Sometimes one of these can have different valences, and extra characters are added to indicate whether they have a higher (高, literally "tall") or lower (亚, typically meaning "sub") oxidation state. Take iron(II) chloride and iron(III) chloride. While the IUPAC standard of roman numerals in parentheses can also be used, "chlorine compounded with iron" (氯化铁) and "chlorine compounded with sub-iron" (氯化亚铁) is more often used. The same goes for the anion part. Sodium sulfate is "sulfur acid sodium" (硫酸钠) (the "compounded with" is omitted when the "acid" is taking up a syllable) and sodium sulfite is "sub-sulfur acid sodium" (亚硫酸钠). No need to guess what -ate and -ite respectively mean when it's right there in the name. Acids and bases are also pretty much the same. Just take the formula and read it backwards.
Organic chemistry features even more characters made up for the sole purpose of making chemistry easier. But it's also where the naming patterns are the closest to English, both conforming to IUPAC standards. But it still remained that each thing is one character (except 酰胺 (amide), which, between 胺 (amine), I can never tell the difference). In Chinese, numbering is pulled from the heaven stems, ten characters representing 1 to 10 (甲乙丙丁戊己庚辛壬癸), which is on the same level as the di- and tri- stuff since most people aren't familiar with the stuff over 4, despite 1 - 4 (甲乙丙丁) being familiar to most. But admittedly I've forgotten most organic chemistry stuff. It seems that anything I learned in high school never stuck, but whatever I learned in middle school stays forever? (Except morality and law. I'd go crazy if that thing stuck.)
The ten heaven stems are originally used in conjunction with the twelve earth branches to name years (each of the twelve earth branches is also associated with an animal from the zodiac). It takes ten by twelve makes sixty years to cycle through all the pairings, which is more than enough for people back then who rarely live above that. This year, 2025, is yǐ sì snake year (乙巳蛇年), and next year it would be bǐng wǔ horse year (丙午马年).
As the saying goes, the only thing that's without exception is the fact that there will be exceptions. ↩︎