Thanks for coming to learn more about the building blocks of language!

The linguistic term in orthographic writing systems comes from the greek world "orthos" which means "straight" and relates to the word for writing "grapho". Orthographies can be divided into three categories: alphabetic, syllabic, or logographic. Chinese is an example of logographic language because its script is made of strokes that create an ideograph. Chinese is not a alphabetic system like English. In an alphabetic language system each word and its spelling and grammar rules have to do with the idea of orthography but these languages can be broken down into even smaller parts called letters. Logographic contains logograms and this would be a single Chinese character. Logograms are also known as logographs or lexigraphs. Logograms work together to create words or phrases which are then called morphemes. Morphemes are different from individual syllables and sounds [@26]. They are a written symbol or character that represents a word or a morpheme or phrase in a language. There are two different systems considered when learning Chinese. These systems are a word centric theory or a character centric theory [@26]. These are important to consider because these are debates about which theory is better to use when teaching Chinese [@n1]. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning or speech in a language. There are many different types of morphemes. Interestingly, some languages have a one for one morpheme to word match. For example in Vietnamese each word only has one morpheme. Learning about morphemes gives context for learning a language and how they are taught, which makes this concept important to consider. This is also important when thinking about whether or not Chinese should be taught from a word centric theory or a character centric system. This project uses aspects of both, but this topic is not as relevant for consideration because these flashcards have to do with word memorization and individual character memorization, so it interacts with both areas of thought. Morphemes break down into different types and categories. Free morphemes are words that can stand alone. For example, the word "stop" carries meaning by itself which makes this a stand alone word. Bound morphemes are parts of a word, not a word by themselves. For example, suffix markers such as '-s' or 'ed' are considered bound morphemes because they need a word to have meaning. There are two type of bound morphemes. These are inflection and derivational morphemes. Inflection morphemes change a word to show its position in a sentence. For example, inflection morphemes may mark number, possession, verb tense, subject verb agreement. So not all bound morphemes are inflection morphemes but all inflection morphemes are bound morphemes. The same is true for the relationship between bound morphemes and derivational morphemes. Derivational morphemes create new words by changing the meaning of a word or part of speech. Both inflection and derivational morphemes change only grammatical markers of words. Finally allomorphs define different ways that one type of morpheme can appear. For example the difference between when a '-s' is added onto 'cats' is just an 's' but in 'dishes' it is an 'es'. Beyond morphemes, there are also different words to describe the same sounds or different sounds being made in a language. For example, polyphonic means something that produces many sounds at once. Polyphonic might be used when talked about 64-voice polyphonic sound coming from the choir, or something in similar terms to that. Homophonic has to do with pronouncing the same but it has a different meaning. Sometimes a word can be spelled differently and have a different meaning. Context is so so so important especially because there are so many same sounding words just with different tones. “There are many exceptions in Chinese grammar, so the context often exclusively shapes the meaning. Because Chinese words do not change depending on case, number, or gender, they have flexible positions in sentences. The person is usually the subject and the passive voice is less frequent compared to English” [@26, 4].