How to Write Animal Chinese Symbols

Series Summary

In Chinese writing, a character, or symbol is used to represent each individual syllable. There are over 47,00 Chinese characters in total, however many of these are rarely used, and the average person would need to know only about four thousand characters to be literate. Most modern Chinese words contain more than one syllable and therefore require multiple characters to write out. However, a person knowing the meanings of individual characters can often infer the general meaning of a word.

In this free video language lesson, our expert will demonstrate how to write the Chinese symbols for animals. You will learn how to pronounce each animal word and how to write the characters for words like cat, dog, pig, chicken, and bird. You will also learn a background on each word and how the characters is derived. If you are interested in learning some basic Chinese words and symbols, let our expert get you started on your way with this free video series on animal Chinese symbols.

Video Transcript

"In this series let's learn some animal names but before that, we should know what is the Chinese for animal, "dong wu". "Dong wu" literally "dong" is "moving" and "wu" means "thing" or "matter". So "moving thing" is meaningfully what we have about "dong wu". "Dong" and "wu" and the right part of "wu" is a character "wu" means "not" and here this part serves as the pronunciation radical of "wu" because this pronunciation is also "wu". O.k. "dong wu" very long left falling stroke here and this, this is the char, this is the radical coming from this character which means "ox or "cow" but when it becomes a radical the horizontal stroke. Now the horizontal stroke looks something like this, a falling, a rising. O.k. "dong wu" "animal"."