How to Write Chinese Characters

Series Summary

The Chinese language has produced many poets studied all over the world, including Du Fu, Bai Juyi, and Li Po. Thousand of poems from these three authors remain, some translated by famous writers such as Ezra Pound and others featured in productions at Disney’s Epcot Center. Chinese is written in characters, and much debate has arisen concerning how exactly these figures became associated with the words or ideas they represent. Some scholars believe much of the Chinese system is made up of ideograms and pictograms, symbols that look like the things they represent. Other scholars consider Chinese more abstract, claiming that the characters represent words or sounds without trying to look like anything at all, like letters in English.

In this free video series, graduate student and teaching assistant Esther-Xiaohua Liu will show you how to write Chinese characters by using the poem “Snowing on the River” by Chinese poet Liu Zongyuan. In these simple demonstrations, Xiaohua shows you how to write and speak in Chinese, starting with individual words like snow, river, mountain, bird, alone, etc. She helps you string the words together as well, recreating two lines of a beautiful poem. This series is a great introduction to writing and speaking Chinese. Time well spent!

Video Transcript

"ESTHER-XIAOHUA LIU: Hi. This is the first two lines of a poem from Tang Dynasty in China. I'm going to talk about each word in these two lines. In China, we have thousands of thousands of beautiful poems from Tang Dynasty. And even though these poems are written a long, long time ago, but you can see the poems just use very simple words. Most of the poems just use very simple words which are similar like the words we are still using right now. In China, many parents would like to teach their kids to recite these poems when they are just about three or four years. See these two lines are called (Speaking Chinese). Maybe for those young kids, it's hard to understand about the meaning, but still because it sounds really beautiful with four tones like (Speaking Chinese). So that way, you make it really fun for kids."