Meeting the characters
๐ฏ Understand how characters are built, and learn your first twenty for real.
๐ฃ๏ธ Say these out loud
- ไบบ rรฉn / ๅคง dร / ๅคฉ tiฤn ๐ ren / da / tyen person / big / sky ไบบ is a walking person. ๅคง is a person with arms stretched wide โ big. ๅคฉ is a line above ๅคง โ what is above the biggest thing: the sky.
- ๆฅ rรฌ / ๆ yuรจ / ๆ mรญng ๐ rr / yweh / ming sun / moon / bright Sun and moon written side by side make ๆ โ bright. Characters are often little arguments like this.
- ๆจ mรน / ๆ lรญn / ๆฃฎ sฤn ๐ moo / lin / sen tree / woods / forest One tree, two trees, three trees. Chinese writing can be beautifully logical.
- ๅฃ kวu / ้จ mรฉn / ้ฎ wรจn ๐ koh / men / wen mouth / door / to ask A mouth at a door is asking. ้ฎ wรจn = to ask.
- ๆฐด shuว / ๆฒณ hรฉ / ๆตท hวi ๐ shway / huh / hi water / river / sea The three dots on the left of ๆฒณ and ๆตท are a squeezed ๆฐด. That mark tells you the word is about water โ it is called a radical.
- ๅฅณ nว / ๅญ zว / ๅฅฝ hวo ๐ nyew / dzuh / how woman / child / good A woman with a child was written as 'good'. Every character carries a piece of the past.
Read every line aloud twice before moving on. The mouth learns a language, not the eye.
๐ Most characters are two halves: meaning and sound
Only a few hundred characters are pictures. Most are compounds: one part hints at the meaning, the other at the pronunciation. Learn the common radicals and a new character stops being random.
- ๅฆ mฤ (mother) = ๅฅณ (woman, the meaning) + ้ฉฌ mว (horse, the sound)
- ๆฒณ hรฉ (river) = water radical + ๅฏ kฤ (the sound)
- About 214 radicals exist; the fifty commonest cover most of what you will read.
- A literate adult knows roughly 3,000โ4,000 characters; 600 already let you read signs, menus and messages.
๐ Among the people
Mainland China uses simplified characters (ๅญฆ, ้จ); Taiwan and Hong Kong keep the traditional ones (ๅญธ, ้). Pinyin, the Roman spelling, was created in the 1950s and is how every Chinese child now learns to read.
๐ Practise today
- Write ไบบ ๅคง ๅคฉ ๆฅ ๆ ๆ ten times each, following the stroke order top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
- Find the water radical in five characters in a dictionary.
- Learn these twenty characters properly before adding any more.
