How to learn chinese: forget about memorizing thousands of symbols,,, watch thousands of cdramas with chinese subtitles and it helps you learn it. When they say the word repeatedly, if you see that symbol again u’ll recognise it and know how it sounds. That how I learnt and I’m fluent in chinese 😉😉 Also cdramas are great af
@@Tallahass33 yeahhh omg, idk if you like period cdramas but I personally love those, I recommend the untamed, the journey of flower, princess agents, ten miles of peach blossoms. If you like modern ones then the interpreter, diamond lover, my little princess, I cannot hug you
Chinese and Russian language reform were only similar in that the goal was to make learning to read and write easier. That's happened with many languages around the world under various systems of government. Certain Russian letters were dropped in 1917 because they were redundant; there were other letters representing the same sound.
Fun fact: the common etymology of the character 東 shown in this video is actually a folk etymology The more widely accepted etymology in the professional level is that the character meant a bag tied on both ends but was then borrowed as the character for east in a process called 假借 (fake borrowing)
This was great, I've been looking for "learning powerful methods to build your Chi energy" for a while now, and I think this has helped. You ever tried - Fellmeroni Rudimentary Chi - (just google it ) ? Ive heard some great things about it and my cousin got excellent success with it.
I've finally added some Spanish subtitles -- please let me know if there are any errors! :-) More subtitles (in Spanish and in other languages) to follow...
Very impressed by your knowledge about and understanding of the subject - too many videos online regurgitate what the creators obviously couldn't quite digest. The accurate pronunciation and an ending scene (sun in the sky, trees on the left, fish leaps out of water, then bird swoops down to catch the fish) that actually makes sense earns you mad props from me, fwiw. :)
@@WorldisOurThing - This video deserves the compliment for sure. :) (the only constructive suggestion I can come up with is to actually touch upon the meaning of the 2 characters 魚 and 鳥 in the main body of the video)
3:06 Interesting. I would like to make a periodic table of elements, that the chemists use. The name of those elements are in kanji (although this video is about the Chinese language). I already found out that: 金 means: gold; 鉄 means: iron; 銀 means: silver. There must be more such names. Many of them are known in normal conversations, others are only known in conversations between physicians and chemists. I found that: 銅 means: copper; 鈉 means: sodium or natrium; 鎂 means: magnesium; 鋁 means: aluminum. Some (may be all) of these four kanji are either out of use or obsolete, or very unusual (I guess that the Japanese will use katakana instead to write the names of these metals). Etc.
Most characters of elements are designed last century. You'll find that metals have a 金(means metal).Liquids have a 水 or 氵(means water). Solids have a 石(means stone). And others have a 气(means gas).
These are actually not hard to learn how to pronounce in Chinese, as most of the elements in Mandarin are semi-transliterated from English. i.e. Aluminium is Lu (the Lu in Alu) Sodium is Na (from Natrium/Na) Magnesium is Mei (Mag sound) etc.
@@acegonzales8047 木 = wood、tree 目 =eye 心 = heart 相 "xiang" = this character mean view (climb the tree and see the distance) 相+心 =想“xiang” 想 = think and miss you (view with heart😂)
Many people might disagree, but I think it's fine to use something like Google Translate for translations. Sure, it might not be the perfect 100%, but if I say something like "I much use translating to talk," you can easily see it as "I often use a translator to talk with others. Really, some people are a little picky about their grammar, but communication is still possible
... though of course, as I'm sure you know, in Japanese the characters don't always mean the same thing as in Chinese -- just as some characters mean different things in different Chinese languages (like 耐 in Cantonese is the equivalent of 久 in Mandarin, etc.) 谢谢收看!
The World is Our Thing there are three kinds of Japanese characters. When it comes to Chinese characters. The Japanese unusually have the same or very similar meaning with Chinese and because the Japan is the first country who interacted in western country so there are a lot of new Chinese words are actually coming from Japanese. For example "民主”， “归制缓和”，“原则”.....
For sure most have the same or similar meaning, but no doubt you've heard the famous example of 手紙 ("letter" in Japanese and "toilet paper" in Chinese), even though 手 still means "hand" in both languages, and 紙 is "paper" in both
So I just gotta memorize Chinese, all of their slang and the history behind it, 200 unique shapes and their pronunciation, than I’m good to speak fluent Chinese!
The 月 on the left side of the character signifies a part of the body, and the stuff on the right side is the character for "paint/lacquer," which is pronounced similarly to the word for "knee" (though in Mandarin not quite the same -- chee=paint, shee=knee)
It's a result of corruption in Chinese, over the years, you can expect somethings to become weird. For instance, the 月 might looks like moon in this font, but it's actually just 肉 "meat" made into a radical (Which is similar to moon) and eventually combined with it too. You can see this in other examples, like 腿-foot, 脚-foot, 肚-stomach, and 胳-arm.
Jerry Du no, moon also means meat simply because it looks like meat hanging on some stick...in the past 月 is more like the left part of 那. It's nothing to do with the corruption of Chinese government
Wow, it's informative and helps to explain radicals and character decompositions. May I add this to my playlist? I just started a channel about writing traditional Chinese characters. Thank you. 😊
traditional dragon is a picto-phonetic or picto-semantic. the picture of the dragon is the character on the right. it's not the head it's the whole dragon. the rest is either a determinant or a phonetic clue. li the standing character on the top left could be the phonetic clue. yue the moon or body character on the lower right either indicates the idea of the lunar calendar or of the fact that the dragon is a corporeal entity. otherwise really great intro to a nice character set: causation, uranium, standing ripe grain, household centipede dou yong you!
The Chinese radicals are pictographic and conveying meaning through visual representation. Only a minority of Chinese characters are wholly pictographic, like the radicals. And the majority of Chinese characters are a vision-sound combination, which is, having a radical to indicate meaning, and another component character to indicate the (compound vowel of) pronunciation. This video was vividly introducing this vision-sound combination!
I think the point is missed. It is not about trying to find some "hidden" meaning... it is about coming up with an interpretation so you can remember the symbol. It really does matter what interpretation you use as long as you can remember what it actually is suppose to mean in the language. Yes, there are some simplifications and the point of radicals is to help simplify, but it really doesn't matter about anything except memorization since any symbol can mean anything(all symbols are abstract) and it is only agreement that makes a symbol have any "meaning". The same goes for the spoken symbols(words). If a person had a photographic memory and perfect recall then there would be no need to have any "story" for the symbol to try and memorize it, one symbol would memorize it. Everyone is looking for a trick to memorize since memorization is typically hard for people(it takes time). We typically can more easily remember things in context which is why we use stories.... but they are just stories at the end of the day. It may be better to simply figure out how to memorize things as they are rather than trying to memorize a story because in the long run it will be quicker.
I wished they taken the right side of "龍" for Simplified Chinese rather than "龙" since "龙" looks quite similar to "花" (Flower) while the "dragon tail" part of 龍 is quite distinctive.
+The World is Our Thing Cool, Japanese 竜 does resemble 龍 more than the Chinese simplified 龙. Its because the "Asian Dragon" is a important symbol of the East Asia so its kinda disappointing for its Simplified character to look...err...nothing like a dragon haha. Just my opinion. In Chinese, Tortoise "龜" is perhaps even more monstrous to write in Traditional form. Luckily, the Simplified form 龟 is much easier to write and it still retains some semblance of its original form.
For sure, the 竜 resembles the Chinese simplified character for "turtle," though I've seen it used for "dragon" in Chinese sometimes just as it is in Japanese.
Actually, now that I think about it, Japanese dragon 竜 looks more like "電diàn" which is Traditional Chinese for "Electricity/Lightning" and Simplified Chinese "电diàn" looks like "龟guī" for turtle. You really have to pay close attention to the differences.
Chinese does not use a phonetic alphabet because all words in Chinese are only one syllable long. This makes Chinese extremely efficient in conveying information, but it means that most characters are pronounced identically to dozens of other characters with completely different meanings, so you need uniquely written characters to distinguish between them, which is why Chinese cannot be written purely phonetically. In spoken Chinese, characters are usually combined with another character with a similar meaning into a two character word to make the meaning less ambiguous.
Because Chinese doesn't have a phonetic system, 1 word usually conveys 1 meaning (some exceptions, but are very rare), this makes Chinese much more information-dense, a sentence that would take 100 words to convey in English, may only need 30 words in Chinese.
But people will go for the traditional “Dragon” character in their tattoo instead of the simplified version. Because the former has more strokes and look cooler.
Probably what you want is something like this book by T.H. Peng, it shows the older forms and how they came to be www.amazon.com/Chinese-Radicals-Treasury-English-Mandarin/dp/0893462918/
There are 3 main ways: * Alphabetizing using Hanyu Pinyin (Roman letters) * Alphabetizing using "BoPoMoFo" (a special alphabet used to express Mandarin Chinese phonetically - I think it's still used in Taiwan) * Ordering the characters by radical, which in turn are ordered by the number of strokes (And there is an order to the strokes themselves which breaks any "ties")
the simplpification of chinese characters wasnt initiated by communist party, it was already proposed by scholars and government of republic of china before kuomintang ran off to Taiwan
@@WorldisOurThing like how to diffrent characters combine to make new words like the character for good or Hào in chinese, the character is also in hello or Nihâo. Is it because they are both greetings? Can you explain how it works? And do raticals have their own noises that combine to make the characters pronoucation?
@@dizzychineseman7445 In the case of 好, it's a combination of 女 (woman) and 子 (child) to mean "good" -- My understanding is that 你好 (ni3hao3 -- literally "you good") is short for 你好吗? (ni3hao3ma -- "Are you well?") Most of the radicals are characters in their own right, like 木 and 目 (both pronounced as mu4 and meaning "wood" and "eye," respectively). But a few are just strokes and don't appear on their own, although they all at least have names If you're interested in where specific characters come from, there are some good online resources, including this Chinese character etymology dictionary: hanziyuan.net/ (though you'll need to be able to input the character you want to research) Hope this helps and thanks again for watching this channel!
@@hisyamhasbi8257 no, individual characters ≠ words. You have to memorise compound words seperately since most of the time they can mean completely different things from the individual characters. 大大=uncle，大=big
In Chinese you can put some random words and combine them to get totally different meaning. For example : 「米」 - rice 「分」 - split 「糸」 - filament 「工」 - work 「女」 - woman 「乃」 - be 「豆」 - bean 「頁」 - page If you put them all together in pairs and you will get : 「粉紅奶頭」, it means "pink tits"
I get confused the both Japanese and Chinese characters are look like the same, isn't right? I try to write like this mandarin but I can't memory them. I feel bad that It is too complicated. There are more than 8, 000 mandarins! It's a such a lot of work!
Thanks for watching the video! Yes, Japanese uses about 500 or so Chinese characters (some simplified, some not) in addition to their two syllable alphabets ("syllabaries"). If you're having trouble learning the characters, I would recommend any of the "Fun With Chinese Characters" series by Tan Huay Peng -- he uses his cartoons to explain the characters, and the books very popular. All together, they cover about 500 characters, which is enough of start to allow to learn other characters fairly easily. Best of luck!
Although Japanese does use a lot of Mandarin characters, they do also use an alphabet. Hence being able to reconize the japanese alphabet is the way to tell the languages apart
Non-native people do not need to learn that much for general application. In Mainland China, the commonly used Chinese Characters are 2500. In Taiwan and also Hong Kong (non simplified) they announced 4500 Chinese characters as commonly used by native. Japan government announced in 2011 that there are 2136 commonly used Chinese characters (kanji) in Japan.
Just want to make a correction about the pinyin of “由“, “柚" and "铀". Those three are supposed to be "you" not "yo" at 2:34, 2:50 and 3:10 of the video clip.
I’ve spent about 100,000 hours studying English humor and Western culture. My native language is Chinese. I’m teaching Chinese language in jokes and pictures. It makes learning Chinese funny and much easier. Hope you can recommend it. Laughter can help us reduce tensions.
my chinese friend used to complain to me how Chinese is so hard eventhough he speaks it as his first language for 26 years and how he still can't read the characters
I know this comment is 2 years old but, in Chinese, most words can be divided into 6 categories on how they were made (六書), this is a pretty advanced idea, so it's not surprising for schools to teach it later in life.
Very interesting. I learned that a lot of Chinese words sound the same but have different meanings, so the character system makes sense in Chinese because you could just swap out one radical in a character and get a completely different word. The problem is that it only works with languages like Chinese. I'd imagine if english tried to write with characters, it would be quite hard to convert and learn because all of our words sound distinctly different. For that matter, I'd imagine Japanese had a similar problem because word construction is very different, although it probably wasn't nearly as hard as an east to west conversion because it came out of the same language family (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong). What puzzles me as well is why some characters have more than 2 radicals in them. Wouldn't 2 radicals be sufficient, or is the meaning too complex to convey in just 2 radicals?
Thanks for watching! And good point about Japanese: Although it uses a lot of Chinese characters (known as "kanji"), it also has two kana syllable-alphabets which fill in the gaps, such as for adding grammatical endings and other inflections that Chinese doesn't have (the various Chinese languages are all Sino-Tibetan, while Japanese is in its own group, sometimes lumped together with Korean). Kana are also used to spell words that don't have kanji, while in Chinese, almost everything can be expressed using only characters. As for characters with more than two radicals, sometimes they'll take an existing two-radical character and add another radical to change the meaning -- so for example 邦 (one of several characters meaning "country") can take the radical for "silk" to become 绑 (meaning "to tie up"). If you're interested, check out the 11-radical character "biang" from the Sichuan dialect of Mandarin -- it's the first character in the list on this link: www.thatsmags.com/china/post/13288/most-complicated-chinese-characters
The World is Our Thing Thank you. I am familiar with kana and the biang character. Kana only came into use in the middle ages of Japan though, so before that they had to adapt Mandarin (or whatever the prominent dialect was at the time) to Japanese completely, which must have been an arduous undertaking. Also, it would make sense that Korean and Japanese are of the same language family because they share a similar history. Both Korea and Japan used Chinese writing for their literature at first, but then rejected it in favor of their own alphabets. Korea completely rejected Chinese while Japan only partially rejected it (evidenced by kanji still being used in Tokyo), which leads me to suspect the conversion from chinese to japanese was a lot easier than from chinese to korean, or it could just be that japanese scholars wished to remain more faithul than korean scholars. Also, Korea has been hotly contested between China and Japan, both seeking to colonize it, and you can see that attitude in the use of Korean slave labor and the Rape of Nanking in WWII. I would not be surprised if such animosity is what led to the Korean language being the way it is today. It is fairly ironic, then, to consider that North Korea's primary supporter in modern times is mainland china. Also, how old is stroke order? Did it come about as part of the PRC's efforts to modernize written chinese?
Ah cool -- you might know better than I, but I'm under the impression that the kana -- specifically hiragana -- was created for the reading of Buddhist texts, where pronunciation was important. I'm not sure how old stroke order is -- a Wikipedia article I just looked at dates the current system to Qin Dynasty, and for lack of other information, I would guess that's correct.
Oh, ok. Thank you. And that would make sense. The oldest texts written in China were the oracle bone etchings, which were used for divination, so it would make sense that Japan would be very similar. Buddhism came to Japan from trade with China, where it originally had come from India, and before that Japan was a pagan "country" (there wasn't a centralized government for a very long time). The irony is that the east overall is considered less spiritual than the west, but their earliest works of literature were spiritual in nature, while the west's work was mostly related to business transactions. I mostly like learning about eastern culture because I like comparing it to the western culture I'm used to to find out which is the "better" culture, but it all seems to come down to opinion really. I forgot to mention clan genealogies were also very important in China, so language probably had signature-writing in mind as well during it's inception, as each individual character would emphasize individuality as well as family of origin.
For sure, a lot to sink one's teeth into in terms of world cultures -- meanwhile, if you're interested, I also have these videos touching on Chinese culture and language: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zjIIO8nR1Kw.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-C3rKCq7ji10.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DXdVVjccKto.html
@@anthonykuhr9860 you r right,the basic meaning of "本" is "root" in Chinese, when the Chinese named Japan 1500 years ago, because Japan is to the east of China, where the sun rises, so they named "日本（sun root）" means it is the location of sun’s root
Apparently the cart (車/车) is the signifier, and it's used because in ancient China they would use the wheel of a cart to thresh grain and make it soft. The "breathing mouth" radical (欠 -- with the line on top being the mouth and the two diagonal lines being the breath) is just there as a phonetic. I'm not sure about other Chinese languages, but I know that in Mandarin, 欠 is pronounced as "qian" (4th tone -- as in "haqian" (哈欠) meaning "to yawn"), while 软 is "ruan" (3rd tone), but I guess whenever and wherever this character was invented, the two words would have sounded close, if not alike.
Also, I note you use the other meaning of 欠 -- to owe -- which is how it's usually used when alone. This is because the "breathing mouth" radical mentioned below was (and can still be) used as the character for "deficient." Maybe this is because heavy breathing meant a deficiency of strength, but I'm just guessing on this one. Anyway, "deficient" eventually became synonymous with "owe"
That's how Chinese works, in Bopomofo (a type of transliteration system) there are only 37 sounds and 5 tones, that's not enough for 8k words, considering that each word can only take a max of 3 sounds and 1 tone.
@@ethanchou4906 ya.. mandarin will have this issue .. I notice there are less such issues in cantonese though. I wonder how many sounds and tones that has
Interesting and well made! Except for the annoying background music. Especially when talking about language sounds cheap royalty-free background music is bad.
Each word in Chinese languages has its own character and there one must learn perhaps thousands of characters in order to know hoe read and write in Chinese characters. When compared to the simpler alphabet writing system, Chinese written language appeared unpractical. How it has advantages over the alphabet writing system. In alphabet writing system, alphabets are arranged to form the sound and pronunciation of words while in Chinese writing system, it conveys the meaning of words instead of the sound of words. Spoken languages continue to change and evolve with new words and terms being adopted while older ones are drop out. Also the pronunciation of words also changes. In alphabet writing system, written words have to be rewritten in order for contemporary readers to understand. In Chinese writing system, written words do not need to be rewritten as frequently as in alphabet writing system. The meaning of written words are the same while the spoken form has change and Chinese written words change vert little over the course of centuries. That's why Chinese books written during perhaps the 13th Century are still readable and understand by contemporary readers while contemporary English speakers have difficulties in understanding English books written during the same period. Also Chinese people may speak dozens of mutual unintelligible languages are able to communicate and other each other through the written languages. Therefore Chinese written language is very practical.
I'm a Chinese speaker and I use traditional Chinese but I never know my language is that kind of incredible and interesting Thanks so much now I love my language so much BTW my dad is a English speaker but I like Chinese more 😂
