Hello, nǐ hǎo and welcome to the yoyo chinese characters course. This is such an exciting
course because you are finally going to become literate in chinese. But before we start,
let me ask you this. Have you ever told anybody that you are thinking of learning to read
chinese? If so, did you get any reactions like these?
Well, I can see that chinese characters definitely have a reputation for not being very intuitive or you say friendly.
To people who haven't learned any characters, they just appear to be random little designs. Sure they
look cool but the idea of memorizing all those little designs is completely overwhelming.
Well, I have great news for you. Chinese characters are not just random designs and learning to
read chinese is a totally reasonable goal. That's because characters actually contain patterns
that appear over and over. Let me show you what I mean by that. Each character can be
broken down into components and once you learn one component, you can combine this one with
other components and form a new character. In other words, these components are like
building blocks, the more you learn, the easier it gets. Because many new characters will
contain components that you already know. Once you learn a set of components, your ability
of forming new characters will grow exponentially. I'm going to start this course by teaching
you several of the key building blocks that you find in lots and lots of characters. Where
you once saw just lines, you will start to see patterns. You will quickly see how characters
are built using familiar shapes that are recycled over and over. And are put together in logical
and even predictable ways. Just to help you better understand this building block nature
of chinese characters, let me point out similar building blocks that exist in english as well.
When I first started learning english, I didn't realize that m-e-n-t with a common component
that can be see in words like statement, enjoyment and government. It wasn't until I learned
several of those words that I noticed the pattern. I wish someone had pointed it out
to me earlier. Written chinese is full of shared components just like that.There are
many many more in chinese than in english. So it makes sense to start with learning those
components first. That way you have a framework that you can easily build upon. When you don't
know anything about chinese, characters can really look like optical illusions through
an inexperienced eye. But once you know the pattern and see them in characters, you can
never unsee them. That would be your first step toward decoding the chinese characters.
Another thing that makes characters not only learnable but also fun is the stories that
you can find in them. Some stories are obvious. For instance, this character contains the
component that means hand over the component that means eye. It's the character for look.
Kàn. You can imagine placing your hand over your eye to sheel the sun as you look off
into the distant chinese landscape. Other characters don't have obvious stories but
you can make them up to help you remember them. For instance, this character means beautiful,
měi. It contains a component on the top that means sheep, and component on the bottom that
means big. So you can maybe picture in your mind a beauty contest for sheep and whichever
sheep is the biggest, wins the title of most beautiful. I know it sounds silly, but it
works right? As I hope you can see by now, much of chinese writing is systematic, and
because of the building block nature of it. The more you learn, the easier it becomes.
In each lesson in this course I will help you find the patterns so that you can easily
put the pieces together and ultimately crack the chinese character code.
Alright, xià cì jiàn. Zài jiàn.