Chinese
There are 50 000 Chinese characters, many people think it's impossible to learn Chinese. I'm going
to explain why you don't need to learn 50 000 characters and how I've learned it.
Actually there's only 214 radicals and the radicals is the building blocks of the characters
so you just need to learn the radicals and then it's like understanding the meaning
so i'm going to give you two examples the first is the character for woman the chinese character
for women is a picture of a woman kneeling down which is fascinating now the man character is
a picture of a plow and underneath is a field and together you can see it is the person who
plows the field the character for plough also means strength fascinating because all of the
characters have this richness of meaning these are basic characters we can look at more complicated
characters and the components and radicals of those this is the character for wealth and it
means rich abundant and it's pronounced full and this has a really interesting meaning because it's
divided into four parts and it has the top part and it looks like a roof on the top it looks like
a chimney with a roof and so this means that in the house and the first thing underneath that it
has a line which is the chinese character for one and then underneath that is a box
and that's the chinese character for mouth because it looks like a mouth then underneath that we have
the field which is the same as the man character together this means that there is enough food from
the field to feed the house it's abundance which is basically meaning that you have enough food
there's so many characters with really interesting meanings like i really recommend that you check
out Uncle Hanzi his name is Richard Sears he's from US he has spent over 20 years to research
the history of chinese characters and he has a website we interviewed him and asked him a lot
of questions and you can read the article here in the description so there are 214
if you just learn these then you can understand the meaning of a lot of characters so if i see
another similar character i can guess the meaning so let me check this this is an award that i won
and the first character you can see it actually very similar to fu this is pronounced fu fu
is pronounced differently with the tone rising instead of falling is a similar meaning but it's
a blessing so it has a similar meaning about one field and mouth but it means blessing and you can
see it's related to abundant and you often see this character on chinese doors during new year
and actually when they put it on the door they would turn it upside down and the reason they do
that is because when it's upside down you when you say that you say fu means that happiness has come
this is how to learn it by learning the little parts of the characters i'm going to introduce
a few different apps that i've been using myself some of the challenges to learning the characters
is how do you how do you work out what that means if you have to search every single character
in the dictionary it's very very hard so let's look at one example this one
so if we're going to search what does that mean in the phone
so if you're going to search you can try uh google translate so you can actually find the character
and then you can understand what it means so that's the concert and you can understand but
you can see if you're actually doing that for all of the characters and it will take a long time
another way you can do it is you can scan so you can use a camera over the text
and then google will translate it this is hard to know because you don't know what the original is
and it's hard to actually learn the character you understand the english so that's why
there's another app that you can use called pleco
now pleco is a it's a great app to use so you can also look at everything in a dictionary it
gives you examples of the characters so if we look at kong sir it will give you an example
and then you can you can find it there but actually i'm going to introduce another app that
i really like and this is called do du chinese this is a great app so this is a great app because
actually on this app you can go through the different lessons and you can learn what it means
if you don't understand you can click on it and you can see the meaning you can save it
and then it goes into your library so you can come back to it later and then you can
review all of the words that you don't know you can also export all the words to another app
and then this is a really good app that i really recommend it's called anki
so here you can learn the characters the meaning and it gives you examples and it's
like it works on the flash cards so if you if you know what it means you click
right if you don't know what it means you go you click again and then it reminds you in two minutes
so all the ones that you do know you can click easy and then it will remind you four days later
and so this means you can learn the most amount of words in the least amount of time
there's also a really great app which i've been using for all chinese which is called lingbe
so on this app you can actually call people and have a conversation because if you're in another
country maybe it's hard for you to find a chinese speaker so you can just use this app and you can
speak to them for free you don't need to pay any money but if you do pay you do get some benefits
and priorities it will match you up with someone so you can talk to practice the language so this
video is not sponsored by any of the apps we don't have cooperation with any of these but if you're
actually looking for advice or looking for chinese programs you can use china emissions platform
which is online platform to search programs in chinese universities and there's also a number
of really good online programs because if you want to learn chinese it's really efficient and easy to
learn from an online program beijing language and culture university have some really good programs
they have one-on-one online chinese program if you're really serious about learning chinese i
really recommend this they say that one hour one on one is equal to four hours in a classroom in
a group and i've taken these classes and i really recommend them i think they're amazing because the
teacher will personalize the course especially for you if you want to learn chinese you can check out
china admissions and we're funded by universities so we give you free advice you can search all
of the universities in china and blc you also have group classes for 12 weeks and the price
is very affordable it's only 168 us dollars at the current exchange rate there are so many characters
in chinese so it's amazing when you can speak chinese because it opens up this whole world
of possibilities and it's easy to communicate and read chinese so thank you for watching do
you have any questions or comments please let me know in the comments below thank you very much