Learn to Read Chinese

The speaker in this video is Shao Lan Hsueh someone who grew up in Taiwan and she is a daughter of a calligrapher, at the beginning 0f the talk she told the audience about her memory with her mom, one of her most treasured memories was her mother showing her the beauty and the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, she was fascinated by this incredible language. But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China.Over the past few years, she sad she has been wondering. if she can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so.

            She started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, she started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. She learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. She said, Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. We only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature enough to read road signs, restaurant menus to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers.

In this video, Shao Lan Hsueh going to show us how the method works. For example, for the word “ person”. If someone walks behind, that is means to follow. If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big."The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. Next, for the word tree, One tree is a tree. Two trees together, there are the woods.Three trees together, create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, there is the foundation.Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's the idiot. The other example, for the word sun. The sun is the source of prosperity.Two suns together, prosperous.Three together, that's sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon it will create the word sunrise.

In addition to the words above, the speaker also gives the other example of words, such as fire, door, and woman, So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow us to build 32.The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, we will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. So, after we know the characters, we start building phrases.For instance,, the words mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano.We know Japan is the land of the rising sun.This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. So a sun, origin together, we build Japan.