Name: Part 1- Introduction to Chinese Characters
Uploaded: 2013-07-11T13:25:23.000Z
Duration: 10 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

They look tough and scary with all of their random lines, swoops and slashes

Adverbs of manner

but they're not actually as difficult as you think.

They're just very different from the phonetic alphabets

With alphabets, the letters act like "building blocks"

and you can put them together to form the sound "tree".

pay attention to  the sounds that you make,

That's how a phonetic writing system works.

Being a "pictographic writing system" means that Chinese characters

So, when you want to write the word "tree"

you don't have to bother with writing letters

You simply draw a picture of a tree (木).

That's how a pictographic writing system works!

The Chinese writing system is based on drawings of things they saw

you are looking at a stylized drawing that depicts an object or an idea.

If a Chinese character is a picture of an object, like a tree,

If a Chinese character is a picture of an abstract idea like "three" or "happy"

it's called an "ideograph", which means "idea picture".

you can simply refer to the Chinese script as "Chinese characters".

You are actually quite familiar with pictographs and ideographs;

you see these types of symbols on a daily basis

all around the world in the form of street signs and warning labels

(like recycle, radioactive, wet floor, no swimming, no smoking, etc.).

These are examples of pictographic symbols

and they are universally understood because the human mind

the brain has an innate drive to decipher the pattern

It's easy enough to draw pictographs for simple objects such as a tree (木),

or a multi-floored tower (高) to express the idea "tall".

However attempting to draw abstract ideas like "have"

or "may" as in "May I?" is a little more complicated.

Consider for a moment what you would draw

to capture the  essence of "have/possess".

Perhaps you could draw a hand with something in it?

That's exactly what the Chinese ideograph portrays:

it's a simple two-part picture depicting a hand with an object in it (有).

How about graphically illustrating the idea "may"?

What could be drawn to represent this complex idea?

The actual Chinese ideograph for this (可)

is composed of two simpler pictographic parts:

By these two simpler pictures combining together,

they paint a picture that can be interpreted as

which is a very interesting way to think of getting permission.

Most Chinese characters work like the two examples above.

Multiple simple pictographs are  combined to convey increasingly

because there is a seemingly endless list of objects, ideas,

situations, actions, and descriptive words used in communication.

It would be very difficult for every word to have

Just for fun, let's look at a few more examples of how

adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.

"Autumn" is the season when grain stalks (禾) in the fields are burned (火).

shading an eye (目) as it gazes into the distance.

Shells were used as currency in ancient times.

To make some purchases, an entire basket (貝)

of shells (貝) was needed, so this is how the Chinese character

To express "not", the Chinese character shows a hand (又)

reaching into swirling water (氵) searching for a lost object (⺇).

The character for "to" shows a bird swooping down towards the ground (土),

The conjunction "must" reminds us of an ancient decree imposed on all men

that required them to maintain long beards and hair (彡) on their heads (頁).

All of these simple pictographic components

to create a balanced visually pleasing Chinese character of uniform size.

Some of these component parts are thin and tall,

Depending on how many of these are combined,

along with the shape of each component part