Chinese Character Tutorial
If you're interested in reading and writing Chinese characters, there's no better place to
get started than with the numbers 1-10. They are quite simple to write, useful to know,
and are exactly the same in both the traditional and simplified writing systems.
So grab a piece of paper and a pencil, give a click on the links below, and try to write
the characters with proper stroke order as demonstrated:
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten
Now that you know these characters, you actually know how to read and write all the
numbers through 100. That's because Chinese follows a very simple pattern for
counting:
11 = 10 + 1 =
12 = 10 + 2 =
20 = 2 + 10 =
21 = 2 + 10 + 1 =
28 = 2 + 10 + 8 =
82 = 8 + 10 + 2 =
99 = 9 + 10 + 9 =
Ready for a challenge? Let's try something a little more interesting:
English: Love Beauty Courage Dragon Fire
Simplified:
Traditional: same same
Because the Chinese simplified system is based on the traditional one, many
characters are exactly the same in both systems, as we saw with the the numbers 1-
10. Even for characters that aren't the same, you will often be able to see similarities.
For example, have a look at the character for "love" in
the simplified and traditional systems. Almost the same, right?
To get a bit more practical, here are the 25 most frequently used characters in the
Chinese language:
Source: http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/
(a is, I, past
not have located person until,
possessiv are me on tense middl
, , big , , arriv
e , , e particl e
no has at people e
particle) yes my e
Sim
p
sam sam sam sam sam
Trad same
e e e e
same
e
same same same same same
do
to (commo up,
will, somethin to
money, want ca ca n yo goo above
this mee g com
supply , n n measure u d ,
t for e
need word) get on
someone
Sim
p
sam sam sam sam
Trad same
e e e e same same
To a non-Chinese speaker (like me), and especially to a Westerner (like me),
Chinese is the most impenetrable family of languages on Earth. While there may
be only an eighth as many syllables as in English, the tonal variations for each
syllable in Standard Chinese impute vastly different meanings. The word "ma"
can mean linen, horse, mother or scold, depending on how your tone rises or
falls.
So what are you supposed to do if you're interested in diving into the culture and
language spoken by 15% of the world's population? You could start by learning
to read Chinese first--a more attainable goal. But how? There are some 10,000
Chinese characters in common use. Basic literacy, according to the Chinese
government, starts at two thousand characters. A solid grasp of a daily Beijing
newspaper requires knowing around three thousand. An erudite Chinese reader
should recognize five to seven thousand characters.
How about eight? ShaoLan Hsueh, a Taiwanese entrepreneur and venture
investor living in London, has developed a visual system for learning to read
Chinese, called Chineasy, that transforms cornerstone Chinese characters
known as radicals into clever illustrations and stories to teach people a basic
vocabulary.
ShaoLan introduced her system in a rousingly well-received TED talk in
February in Long Beach, Calif., the video of which should go live in May. She
says she's gotten more than a thousand emails and LinkedIn invites since then
from people who want to get started. In the meantime, she has published a
Facebook page introducing her concept. (If you go to the Facebook page, you
have to start from the bottom of the timeline and work up, because the lesson
follows a particular order.) She's also published a charming placeholder of a Web
site here.
"I grew up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher. Some of my earliest and
most treasured memories are of my mother showing me the beauty, shape and
form of Chinese characters. Ever since then I have been deeply fascinated by the
structure of this incredible language," says ShaoLan. "Twelve years ago I moved
to England and enrolled at Cambridge University. Two years later, I had one
degree and two children. As I settled into my new life, I observed how in vogue
China was and how eagerly people wanted to embrace the culture yet they
struggled with the language. Even my own children found it daunting. Thats
when I started to think about how a new, simpler method for reading Chinese
might be useful. By day I worked as an Internet entrepreneur and venture
capitalist and by night I was consumed with creating a system to make learning
Chinese easy."
ShaoLan worked with London design firm Brave New World and Israeli
illustrator Noma Bar to breathe a little life into eight basic radicals, and then
expanded on those by working them into pictographic stories.
Take a look. Here's "ren," the radical for person, illustrated with head and feet:
Here's the character and word for mouth. It's harder to forget with teeth, tongue
and uvula:
Two people make the word follow. Three is a crowd. A person with arms
stretched wide is "big." A person inside a mouth is a prisoner.
Putting the lesson to work, here's the Chinese-language cover of the Harry Potter
novel The Prisoner Of Azkaban. Can you spot the character for prisoner?
Here's the word for adult, combining big and person:
Here's the word "adult" on the upper left-hand corner of a cover of a Japanese
magazine (Chinese and Japanese share the same character set, more or less).
See? You're already reading Chinese.
Here's a Chinese ad for Ray Romano's sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond." Can
you spot the word "everybody" now that you know the word for person?
Here's the character for tree, with a dollop of vegetation on top for good
measure:
Two trees are woods, three make a forest, and there are other logical variations.
Here's a promo for NBA star Jeremy Lin, also from Taiwan, where Lin in a pretty
common name that means forest. Spot it?
To be sure, ShaoLan is taking liberties with the language here. Very few Chinese
characters are actual pictographs that reflect the meanings of the words. This is
supposed to be good fun, and a way to remember what's what. "The illustrations
are the first step in my method," she says. "The beautiful images allow people to
remember characters easily. We can illustrate hundreds of them. We illustrate
all the radicals and lots of the new characters you build from radicals whenever
they make sense. Once people recognize the radicals and are trained to decipher
any given character, they will need to start to understand a bit of Chinese culture
and history to comprehend more characters."
In an example of weaving in a little history, here's the character for mountain,
with Chineasy illustration on top.
Two mountains stacked on top of each other mean to get out. In ancient times,
the Emperor sent his enemies into exile beyond the mountains. Today, exile has
come to mean to get out.
You can pick up a few more Chinese characters by flipping through this gallery:
