Making Chinese Radicals for 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 series, learn how to write some basic Chinese symbols. Esther-Xiaohua Liu is an instructor of Chinese literature, and she has even published poems in Chinese. Esther-Xiaohua Liu demonstrates how to write a variety of different Chinese characters and symbols. Using the Chinese grass radical, find out how to write hero, health, tea and seedling. Also, learn food Chinese symbols, such as banana, celery and apple. With this video series, get free Chinese lessons. So, take a moment, and learn how to write some Chinese symbols today!

Video Transcript

"Chinese writing is very different from most other languages in the world. In the Chinese writing system, Chinese symbols represent each character which corresponds to a single spoken syllable. A majority of words in all modern varieties of Chinese require two or more characters to write. Many Chinese characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. Chinese characters are also considered to be the world's longest continuously used writing system."