Chinese Characters EXPLAINED

a lot of people have the misconception that  Chinese characters are pictographs that they   are mini pictures of the thing they represent  while this is true in some cases like in the   character for door tree or man pictographs  actually account for just five percent of   all Chinese characters in this video you'll  learn how the other 95 of Chinese characters   are constructed and how just one simple  formula is key to understanding them [Music]   Chinese characters are cool but you know what  else is cool free giveaways about a month ago   I partnered with italki to give away 50 worth of  one-on-one language lessons to a lucky subscriber   and Paul was the winner of that giveaway as you  can see from his water bottle he is clearly living   in China right now where he's actually a teacher  at an international school in Guangzhou with   italki lessons starting at just five dollars and  thousands of native teachers to choose from Paul   will probably get quite a few lessons in we'll  check back with him in a little bit but first   let's begin to decipher how Chinese characters  are constructed and it all begins with this book   this is a Chinese dictionary and if we go back  in time to 100 A.D we would be able to read the   very first Chinese dictionary written by a guy  named xu shen this dictionary not only listed the   definition of 9000 characters of the time it also  explained their Origins and organized them into   six categories known as liu shu or six writings but  only one of these categories is the key to 80 percent of   all Chinese characters try to guess which one four  of the categories describe ways characters are   created and two describe ways characters are  used the first category is pictographs (xiàng xíng zì) which   we already discussed if you look at characters  like mǎ yuè or mù especially in their ancient   forms you can easily see that they represent ideas  visually pictographs are usually the most ancient   characters and can only represent simple concrete  ideas the second category is ideographs (zhǐ shì zì) they're   like a step up from pictographs and visually  represent a complex or abstract idea with a   mark for example we can start with the character  mù which means wood and visually represents a   tree if we add a line to the bottom it becomes běn  which means stump or bass or foundation in modern   Chinese add a line on top and it becomes mò  which represented the top of trees in ancient   Chinese and end in modern Chinese like in the word  zhōu mò weekend the characters for up and down were   originally written like this and also fall in this  category the third category is compound ideographs   these characters are the combination of two or  more meaning components for example the character   xìn to believe is composed of a man radical and  a speech indicating that a person and their words   ought to be trustworthy or the character for tears which is a combination of your eyes and   three drops of water it's interesting to know  that the traditional form of this character uses   a different type of construction the semantic  phonetic compound which is our next category   the semantic phonetic compound xíng shēng zì are also a  combination of two ideas but one component is a   meaning component and the other is a sound  component in the character fàn which means   cooked rice or food in general the left component  is the food radical showing the meaning of food   while the right component is pronounced fǎn  showing the pronunciation of the character 然后呢 do you know how to  save the day before yesterday 怎么说啊 前天 对非常好 yesterday 昨天 today 今天 hello hey there nice to meet you I know I  already watched the videos you sent me but how   was the lesson overall it was good you know the  teacher was very professional she was really uh   ready with lots of questions and lots  of really good content challenged me yeah And uh it just made me realize that I need a lot of work with spoken with speaking I think this is a really really good  experience it forced me to do this I've   been kind of wanting to set myself up with  something it forced to jump in the deep end I'm glad to hear that   I will enjoy my remaining lessons cheers thank  you very much I appreciate it all right bye-bye   take care man you too and if you guys are a little bummed  that you missed out on the giveaway don't   worry there's still a chance to get a great  deal at italki you can use my code ab5 to get   five dollars for free when you spend ten dollars  or more this code is only available for the first   50 people who use it so be sure to take advantage  of this offer and now back to regular programming   the last two categories in liu shu describe  ways that characters are used not how   they're created and they are mutually explanatory  characters zhuǎn zhù zì and loaned characters jiǎ jiè zì mutually explanatory characters are honestly  difficult to explain and doesn't occur very   often it explains a phenomenon when one character  evolves into two different characters over time   or across different regions for example kǎo  and lǎo were originally one character meaning   the long one but one went on to mean a measure  of aptitude AKA to test while the other went on   to mean long in age or old loan words seem to  naturally occur in any language so this is not   a surprise at all but loan words are inherently  challenging to decipher because by nature they   don't have to make sense like the word Soju which  is loaned from Korean which is loaned from Chinese   and makes no sense at all in English unless  you look at its origins so let's take a look   at a super common character like wǒ which means  the pronoun I or me if you look at it visually it   doesn't seem like anything that would indicate  oneself and that's because when this character   was created it had absolutely nothing to do with  its current meaning in fact you may have noticed   it looking a little bit like a couple other  characters that's right the wǒ character actually   represented a weapon of war and yes I have a  picture this spearhead like thingy with three   sharp blades would have been mounted on a pole  and used to kill people talk about a dark past   but on a brighter note out of the six categories  we just discussed you only need to understand one   category to decipher 80 percent of all Chinese  characters and that category is the semantic   phonetic compound these characters are by far  the most common and follow a simple formula   one component that indicates meaning plus  one component that indicates pronunciation   just understanding one of these two components  will drastically help you learn characters and   understanding both would be a huge advantage  if you understand the semantic component which   is usually a radical it'll help you to remember  characters that are related in meaning like if   you know that the mù radical indicates wood then  the characters for tree chair village and school   will make sense to you you notice that a bunch of  weather-related characters had the rain radical   like cloud frost snow and fog a bunch of language  related words have the speech radical like   language speak thank and invite verbs done with  your hands have the hand radical like touch hit   pick up and lift verbs done with your feet have  the feet radical like kick jump step on and run   sea animals have the fish radical like shark whale  carp and cod insects have the bug radical minus   some incorrect classifications from our ancestors  and finally if you understand the phonetic   component you can predict the pronunciation of  unknown characters for example this character   is pronounced qīng and means a green or blue  and these characters are pronounced qǐng qīng qíng qíng jìng jīng jīng this character bāo means bag and  these characters are pronounced bào bǎo bāo páo pǎo pào or just look at the many groups of  characters with matching phonetic components qián jiǎn jiān bǎ bà ba gē gē xī xī cǎi cài cǎi but the problem is you can't always rely on this  system to interpret new characters you encounter   the semantic component is usually a good general  classification of the character but the phonetic   component is only accurate a fraction of the time  the cherry-picked examples I used are only the   best cases of semantic phonetic characters the  next issue is that they are sometimes outdated   for example the character shéi is a perfect  example of a semantic phonetic compound the   radical indicates speech and the main component  indicates the pronunciation zhuī this character   next to it looks similar so you might presume  that it follows the same convention except   you'd be wrong the first reason is because  this character was poorly simplified with the   meaningless placeholder yòu but even if you looked  at the traditional form you still wouldn't be able   to decipher it because it is in fact a loan word  Yep this character originally meant a type of bird   absolutely nothing to do with its modern meaning  the final limitation if you're still a beginner   is that the phonetic component may not be common  enough for you to know it at your current level   what I mean is that a very common character like  chàng might follow the semantic phonetic pattern   perfectly but the phonetic portion is actually  a pretty rare word that you probably won't   encounter until much later the previous example  shéi also uses a rare phonetic component but at   least it's used in a few other common characters  enough that you can pick up on the pattern even   if you don't know what it means but when you do  reach an advanced level you'll find that a lot of   scientific words in Chinese are super easy to  understand for example plants and animals the   name of almost all trees in Chinese follow the  semantic phonetic compound to a tee bǎi fēng sōng they all use the wood radical followed by a very common  component that hints the pronounciation And have you seen the periodic table in Chinese almost all  of them have the gold radical to indicate a metal   and if we take a look at this row and look at the  phonetic components individually you can see how   easy it is to predict the pronunciation  of an element you've never seen before   you could say that this is more of a pattern  and less of a rule but at least now you know   how native Chinese speakers are sometimes able to  guess the meaning or pronunciation of characters   that they don't know and it really is no more  than an educated guess and it's impossible to   guess correctly 100% of the time but it is  an important concept for you to understand   and will help you learn Chinese characters  faster so I'd encourage you to go through   the characters that you know even if it's just a  few hundred and try to find the semantic phonetic   compounds within them I'll bet you there's a  lot until next time happy learning peace out

Channel: ABChinese

Views: 133,146

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Id: RNtBJMVCQhk

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023