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Learn to read Chinese. with ease! - ShaoLan

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Rating: 4.0; Vote: 1

building from a few simple forms to more complex concepts. Call it Chineasy. Talk by ShaoLan. Independent: Chinese never managed to make the step the Phoenicians did 3500 years ago when they took the Egyptian hieroglyphs and stop associating the meaning to the symbol and started associating the sound to the symbol. Then the Greeks evolved it and the Romans made that system of writing the alphabet we have today. The only advantage of Chinese is that the meaning is independent from the pronunciation, which is very valuable in a large country where different communities may be speaking different languages. But the opportunity cost is having to learn thousands of them. The advantage of the alphabet is that is easy to read and after a couple lessons anyone can read any language and searching a dictionary is easy. Chinese may be intriguing but it is very expensive to learn in terms of time and remembering. 2000 characters are the minimum needed to read a newspaper but make no mistake: many characters will be unknown. Not to mention how hard is to find the meaning. All characters are made of a couple hundred of radicals (considering all the various forms) and it is necessary to understand which is the leading radical and then know how to count the remaining strokes. Then search that character in the dictionary looking into the group of all those that have that number of strokes. And to count the strokes it is necessary to learn the concept of the order of the strokes. Chinese is difficult in all its forms with Japanese being more difficult (less simplified) and Taiwanese and Hong Kong writing the most complex. Good luck!
Date: 2020-08-22

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Comments and reviews: 4

Patrick
Well, these pictographic way of representing Chinese characters got it to be easily understood works with very few characters. A person might be cheated into thinking that that's how all of it works when it coined to characters. If you learn few characters it can be easy to dismantle them in that way but when you reach 1000, 2000, 3000, and so on. I don't think it will be of any use. Nevertheless this helps with those few characters but I don't think you will find any relationship in many characters to why they mean such and such a thing.
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tiny
I think it would be pretty helpful to show the ancient Chinese characters of the basic characters. Like how the character for moon looked like a crescent shape of the moon, and water looked like a river.
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Elijah
This is actually really cool. Chinese often seems really complicated however as I have seen elsewhere most symbols they are designed to look like what they mean giving logic to all of it.
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Micaela
I loved this! I always thought Chinese was daunting but now it seems so much easier! I even made an entire side wall with the Chinese symbols that I drew!
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