How to Learn Chinese Characters for Beginners with Yoyo Chinese.

Hello, nǐ hǎo and welcome to the Yo! Yo! Chinese Characters course. This is such an exciting course because you are finally going to become literate in Chinese. But before we start, let me ask you this. Have you ever told anybody that you are thinking of learning to read Chinese? If so, did you get any reactions like these? Chinese characters are so abstract. I just see like little like pretty lines and scratches and stuff. Aren't there thousands of them? That seems like an overwhelming task. I wouldn't even know where to start. Wow, good luck with that. Well, I can see that Chinese characters definitely have a reputation for not being very intuitive or user-friendly. To people who haven't learned any characters, they just appear to be random little designs. Sure, they look cool, but the idea of memorizing all those little designs is completely overwhelming. Well, I have great news for you. Chinese characters are not just random designs and learning to read Chinese is a totally reasonable goal. That's because characters actually contain patterns that appear over and over. Let me show you what I mean by that. Each character can be broken down into components and once you learn one component, you can combine this one with other components and form a new character. In other words, these components are like building blocks. The more you learn, the easier it gets because many new characters will contain components that you already know. Once you learn a set of components, your ability at forming new characters will grow exponentially. I'm going to start this course by teaching you several of the key building blocks that you find in lots and lots of characters. Where you once saw just lines, you'll start to see patterns. You'll quickly see how characters are built using familiar shapes that are recycled over and over and are put together in logical and even predictable ways. Just to help you better understand this building block nature of Chinese characters, let me point out similar building blocks that exist in English as well. When I first started learning English, I didn't realize that M-E-N-T was a common component that can be seen in words like statement, enjoyment and government. It wasn't until I learned several of those words that I noticed the pattern. I wish someone had pointed out to me earlier. Written Chinese is full of shared components just like that. There are many many more in Chinese than in English. So it makes sense to start with learning those components first. That way you have a framework that you can easily build upon. When you don't know anything about Chinese, characters can really look like optical illusions through an inexperienced eye. But once you know the pattern and see them in characters, you can never unsee them. That will be your first step toward decoding the Chinese characters. Another thing that makes characters not only learnable but also fun is the stories that you can find in them. Some stories are obvious. For instance, this character contains the component that means hand over the component that means eye. It's the character for look, kàn. You can imagine placing your hand over your eye to shield the sun as you look off into the distant Chinese landscape. Other characters don't have obvious stories, but you can make them up to help you remember them. For instance, this character means beautiful, měi. It contains a component on the top that means sheep and a component on the bottom that means big. So you can maybe picture in your mind a beauty contest for sheep and whichever sheep is the biggest wins the title of most beautiful. I know it's so silly, but it works, right? As I hope you can see by now, much of Chinese writing is systematic and because of the building block nature of it, the more you learn, the easier it becomes. In each lesson in this course, I'll help you find the patterns so that you can easily put the pieces together and ultimately crack the Chinese character code. Alright, xià cì jiàn, zài jiàn. Chinese characters you need to learn to be able to communicate with Chinese people. It's not as many as you think. Click here to start learning characters today at YoYo Chinese. Click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Alright, thank you, zài jiàn.