Hello 你们好！This is ChineseFor.Us Hands-on Writing StrokeByStroke! I’m Lili.
And I’m Chuck! Thanks for joining us! As we’ve mentioned in our last video. You
could either write down the characters, or you can also type them.
Let’s try both and see how they work. First I’ll write down the character “我(wǒ)”.
It means I or me. It has 一(yī), 二(èr), 三(sān), 四(sì), 五(wǔ), 六(liù),
七(qī) 画(huà). That’s 7 strokes. And here I’ll show you how to type out the
same character. I’m using the Windows 10 default Chinese IME, the pinyin for “我(wǒ)”
is “w-o”, so I will type out “w-o” here. When typing, we don’t need to worry
about the tones, just type out the pinyin spelling. And now after I typed the spelling,
we see a list of all the characters that share the same spelling as “wo”. And all I have
to do now is just type the number that’s in front of the character that I want. See
here it is. It’s listed as No.1, so I’ll just go ahead and type the number 1. And there
it is. Also, there are other pinyin typing tools,
and they all share the same typing method and process. We recommend Baidu Pinyin Input,
Sougou Pinyin Input or QQ Pinyin Input. They are made by big companies in China. Personally,
I’ve tried all of them, so have most of my friends and family in China. Google Pinyin
Input is also good. You could try out all of them and see which
one you prefer. You could download the input to your computer, or your android devices
or your IOS devices. I would say that most of the time, these third party Pinyin inputs
are better than the default ones. OK. Let’s try another one.
This time I'll try a word. How about “品味(pǐnwèi)”, I’ll write it down
here. 一(yī), 二(èr), 三(sān), 四(sì), 五(wǔ), 六(liù), 七(qī), 八(bā), 九(jiǔ),
十(shí), 十一(shíyī), 十二(shi’èr), 十三(shísān), 十四(shísì), 十五(shíwǔ),
十六(shíliù), 十七(shíqī). It’s 17 strokes.
And I’ll type it out with the Pinyin syllable “pǐnwèi”. That’s p-i-n-w-e-i. Again
we don’t have to worry about the tones. So in the list, there are three words. 1 is
“品味(pǐnwèi)” 2. is “品位(pǐnwèi)” and 3 is “聘为(pìnwéi)”. Ours is the
first one, so I will just go ahead and type 2 and here’s our word.
From the way we typed out the word, you could see that, as long as we could recognize the
characters, we were able to type them out. So typing doesn’t require us to actually
be able to write the characters by hand. But memorizing the look of the characters
could not be easier as long as A. you know the stroke and element construction
of the characters—this is the understanding part;
And B. you practice writing each character a few times—because this helps in memorizing
them. And one thing we would recommend is that,
for practical usage, like study, work, social or everyday purposes, typing is way easier
and even Chinese people use typing a lot more than writing these days.
But to understand the Chinese writing system better, and for you to be able to type better,
understanding the basics of character construction is key. Also personally I love the idea of
being able to write the Chinese characters too. Apart from its use, it’s like an interesting
puzzle and also an art. Right. Hope this video would help. 谢谢收看(xièxie
shōukàn)！ Thanks for watching! Next time we’ll talk
about Simplified Characters vs. Traditional Characters. Stay tuned. And see you next time!
再见！zàijiàn!