Hello welcome back, this is our last introductory lesson before you learn your first chinese
characters. But before we dive in, I want to make sure you meet our course prerequisites
first. We strongly believe that spoken chinese and written chinese should be taught separately.
And it's more efficient if you learn how to speak first. And then how to read and type.
Based on this philosophy, this character course is designed for learners, who either have
already completed our yoyo beginner conversational chinese course or at least have the basis
of spoken chinses down. The focus of this course is to teach you the characters for
things you already know how to say. In other words, you should get the how to say part
done before you take this course. I hope that's clear. Alright, now let's talk a little bit
about the characters we teach. You might know that there are two categories of chinese
characters. Simplified, jiǎn tǐ zì and traditional fán tǐ zì. Originally all characters
were the same, but at one point the government of mainland china wanted to raise the literacy
rate in china, and they came up with ways to make some of the more complicated characters
a little simpler and easier to learn. For example, this is character for horse, mǎ
in simplified characters, and this is how it looks in tradition characters. This is
the character for door, mén in simplified characters, and this is how it looks in traditional
characters. So they use those simplified characters in mainland China as well as in Singapore.
They kept the traditional characters in Hong Kong and Taiwan. How different are the two
systems? Well about 80% of the characters are the same in simplified and traditional.
So there's not a huge difference between the two. And I think most chinese people have
enough exposure to both systems that they can read either one. The primary focus of
this course will be on simplified characters. But for the 20%of the characters that are
different in the traditional form, we will show you that version too, on the practice
sheets. Great, now let's take a look at how our lessons are organized by going over some
numbers. In this course, we are going to learn a total of 300 characters. The lessons that
are grouped into 5 levels. Each level covers a total of 60 characters .We are going to
break these 300 characters down into bite-size mini lessons, with each lesson covering 3
new characters. To help you retain what you learn, we are also going to have a lot of
review lessons. For every 15 new characters you learn, we are going to arrange a review
lesson. At the end of the course, we are going to have 3 big review lessons. we give those
300 characters a very special name, the YoYo 300, because they are like the warriors in
the movie 300, which by the way is one of my favorites. As a group, they are small but they are extremely
powerful. Together they can accomplish a lot. By knowing these 300 characters, not only
will you be able to read and type a lot of what you can already say, buy you will also
be ready to learn any other new character that comes your way, because theses 300 characters
will cover all the basic components you need to know. The YoYo 300 will give you a really
solid foundation. So how exactly will I teach you the YoYo 300? Well, I think most people
learn best if they have lots of different ways to remember a character. So each time
I introduce a new character, I will use arrange of tools from stroke order demonstrations
to cartoon illustrations to animations. There will be a lot of supplementary materials for
each lesson. After watching the video, you can practice on your own with our review worksheets.
The worksheet will include basic review and practice materials as well as a lot of bonus
stuff. For example, one of the bonuses in the review worksheet is that we are going
to show you real life images of street signs or texts that use the YoYo 300 characters.
So that you can get used to recognizing characters in all sources of authentic settings. We also
provide you an opportunity to practice your handwriting in our review worksheet. Just
in case you want to learn how to write characters by hand. You can also use it to help you recognize
chinese characters better. And lastly, we will also provide you a quiz sheet for each
lesson, which will allow you to track your own progress. Well I'm definitely ready to
get started and I hope you are too. In our next lesson, you will learn your first 3 characters.
I can't wait. Alright, see you in the YoYo 300. Zài jiàn.