Hello, welcome back. Do you believe yet that chinese characters are not just little random
designs? Have I convinced you yet that there are patterns and clues inside of characters
that help you learn them systematically. If not, I plan to have you convinced by the end
of this lesson. To help you see this, I want to tell you a little about how chinese characters
came to be. Way back around 4000 years ago, people in china already had a language that
work great for talking. But that was too limiting. They needed another way to communicate so
they began making up a script. Sounds like a huge project right? How do you even begin
to create a script for entire language. Well, they did the same thing that you and I would
have done. They started with the easy stuff first. They looked at a tree and thought to
themselves 'ok, I can do that. I can draw a tree'. So they drew this and it became the
accepted way to write the word tree. To this day, this character means tree or wood in
chinese. They did the same thing with lots of other words. For example, this is how they
drew a person. It actually looks like a person, doesn't it. And this is how they drew a sheep
or goat. You can see the two dots at the top to represent the two horns. I'll let you call
theses types of characters' what you see is what you get', because they are just pictures
of the words that they represent. After some characters like those were established, people
also began to put two or more pictures together to form a new character. For example, this
character is two trees put together, it means forest. Totally logical right? Making up a
new written language by drawing what you see is really cool. But some abstract concepts
are not easily drawn. So our ancestors had to get really creative in order to represent
words that weren't just objects. Here's a great example. This character shows a person
beside a tree. Like someone leaning against the tree for shade and support, it means to
rest. I call these types of characters meaning plus meaning characters, because inside them
you can find two different components that give you a hint about it's meaning. In many
cases, this work just fine. To simply use a picture or combination of pictures to represent
meaning. But it didn't work all the time. They needed a new method for creating characters.
I like to imagine that the process when something like this. They needed a new character to
represent the word ocean. Maybe they tried putting together several characters for water
but it just didn't look quite right. So someone said 'hey wait a minute, the word for ocean
yáng sounds exactly like the word for sheep yáng, they are both pronounced yáng. Everybody
knows the sheep character already, why don't we just use the same one?' Everybody thought
that was an interesting idea, but might be too confusing. After all how do you distinguish
two different concepts that are represented by the same character? So somebody else came
up with a great compromise. Why don't we just put a few drops of water beside the character
for sheep. That way everybody would know that this is a character pronounced as yáng and
it relates to water. That way it has to mean ocean then. So now we have the ocean character
with the water component on the left hinting the meaning and sheep component on the right
to hint the sound. This turn out to be a really great way to form new characters. We have lots
of characters like this in chinese. And I call them meaning plus sound characters because
they have one component that gives you a clue about it means, and another component that
gives you a clue about how to pronounce it. Now there's one caveat here that I mentioned
before and I want to repeat again. Not all characters can be summed up so nicely. For
example, do you remember the měi character example that I used before, which means beautiful?
It's got the character for sheep on top and the character that means big on the bottom.
Why? Who knows. I like to call characters like these 'random characters', because whatever
significance they originally had has been lost over the years. And now they just appear
to be more or less random. Well, there's no limit here. Characters like this give you
a chance to put your imagination to work. Whether or not you enjoy coming up with stories
like that, the good news is that most characters do contain some clues to help you work out
their meaning and or pronunciation. I also hope that this brief introduction of how chinese
characters are made up gives you a even better understanding of their building block nature.
Very soon, you will learn how to put the clues and pieces together and finally be reading chinese.
Alright, xià cì jiàn. Zài jià.