Chinese Writing & Supplies : Chinese Symbols for Calligraphy

Learn the Chinese symbols for calligraphy with tips on writing and pronouncing Chinese characters from a Chinese language specialist in this free video on Chinese words and phrases.

Expert: Bo Feng
Bio: Bo Feng is an experienced Chinese/English translator and interpreter. He has worked for Chinese International Travel Services, Lingnan Art Publishing House and Phillips Petroleum.
Filmmaker: Christian Munoz-Donoso

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• chinese characters
• chinese
• chinese language

[newwarsovereign]

@Icaurs389 And if you are free and able enough, learn Cantonese with Mandarin would be even better, as Cantonese has kept many ancient features in vocabularies and tones, with almost undeniably most developed, advanced and abundant foul language system among the languages worldwide. But I can say it is at least 5 times harder than Mandarin to reach similar levels.

[newwarsovereign]

@Icaurs389 As I know, Japanese is also full of grammatical rules that require much effort to digest. If you want to get rid of the rigid rules as in western languages, I would recommend Chinese. I guarantee you will not regret once you master the language, due to the sophisticated cultural values it contains and the freedom of the usage of the language.

But the premise is that you are confident to cope with the most complicated writing system existing in the world today.

[Icaurs389]

@newwarsovereign Recently I went to an open day on a college and participated in a Chinese lesson. But I am still doubting between learning Chinese or Japanese :S They sound quite differently so I'm not sure which to choose. First I was for Japanese, but I bought a book to learn some Chinese and now I'm for studying Chinese. And I love the sentence constructions and grammar, in opposite to all the hard western languages..

[newwarsovereign]

@Icaurs389 Of course there are regularities, otherwise it would be impossible to learn 3000 daily used words thorougly, not to mention the words out of the scope for the use of literature or academic purposes. Of course, maybe at least 100 words had to be remembered without any attempts to find shortcuts. But then, the shape of many words can be guessed by how they sound like, and vice versa. Of course, not 100% accuracy, but that's how most Chinese kids learn the language.

[Icaurs389]

@newwarsovereign Wow, it sounds hugely complicated but you are true about it's possibilties. And I learned there are some regularities in the chinese writing.

[newwarsovereign]

@Icaurs389 石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。施氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅­適市。

All the single words above sound as 'shi' in mandarin, with slight difference in 'tones'.

In English, 'A poet "Shi" in a stone room likes lions, swears to eat ten lions. Shi frequently goes to see lions in market. In ten o'clock, coincidentally there are ten lions arrived in the market.' Much more clumpsy, and impossible to express it if Chinese becomes alphabet.

[newwarsovereign]

@Icaurs389 The complicated characters express various meanings, even in a single word. The complexity wins the language an advantage, of its conciseness. When a Chinese character use same size as Latin letters, it requires approximately 60~70% length (orally also) as English. Maybe even 30~40% for ancient Chinese. But an alphabet which only represents sounds is impossible to support such conciseness, and leads to ambiguity in comprehension. If I use Chinese now, more content can be expressed.

[WonderNoobie]

coooool

[Icaurs389]

Why don't the Chinese people use something like an alphabet? It would be so much easier to learn an alphabet than to learn thousand of complicated characters. Because if someone who is better educated than you writes a letter to you it could be highly possible that you just can't read some (critical?) parts of it, right? And also if they use a system like us they wouldn't waste so much time on just learning the characters, writing and perhaps reading them.

So I think it is quite inefficient

[Pinkynose499]

this is gr8! thanks for sharing!