Learn Your First Chinese Character in 5 Minutes with Yoyo Chinese (Part 1).

Hello, welcome to the first video of the yoyo300 series. This is the first lesson of level 1. In this lesson, you'll learn your first 3 characters. Very exciting. Before we begin, I want to teach you how to say Chinese characters in Chinese. The word is hàn zì. Hàn refers to the Han people or the ethnic group that the majority of Chinese people belong to. zì just means character. So now you can tell people wǒ zài xué hàn zì. I'm learning Chinese characters. Ok, let's get started. Do you remember how to say person or people in Chinese? Right, it's rén. That's your first hàn zì. This hàn zì is an example of what you see is what you get character. Doesn't it look like a person walking? This is how it's written stroke by stroke. Let's take a look at other words that contain the character rén. The Chinese word for man contains this character. It's nán rén. Notice that we've given the pinyin for nán but not for rén. From now on, we'll be mixing pinyin and hàn zì all the time depending on whether we've taught the character or not. So does the word for woman, nǚ rén. Great, that's your first character. For our next character, I want you to think about how to say the word from as in from here to there. The word is cóng. Cóng is your second character. Can you see that it's basically just two rén squeezed together into one character? So now you know that rén can be a character on its own and it can also be a component of another character. As you can see, when a character becomes part of a new character, often it's gonna change its shape to accommodate. In this case, rén has to narrow itself to squeeze into the new character. This is how cóng is written stroke by stroke. It's pretty easy to come up with a way to remember this character. For example, you could think about two people walking all the way from Beijing to Shanghai. Learning hàn zì is a highly individualized process. Everybody has a different method that works best for them. Some people like to make up little stories. If that's true for you, then it's best if you can come up with these stories yourself. The more embarrassing, the more absurd it is, the better it is. Because strong emotions help things stick. Alright, before we move on, let me quickly teach you a few bonus characters. I said you're going to learn three characters in this lesson, but in reality, it's going to be six. But you'll see it's no extra effort. Take a look at these three characters, one line, two lines and three lines. Those are the characters for one, two and three. yī, èr, sān. So easy, right? Let's read this together. Cóng yī dào sān. From one to three. Now tell me, what's the most generic measure word in Chinese, the one that's used the most with almost any noun? Yep, it's gè. This is your last character for this lesson. You can see that this one is just a rén on the top with one vertical line underneath. It looks like an arrow pointing up, doesn't it? Here's how it's written stroke by stroke. Now let's read this together. Sān gè rén. What does that mean? Yes, three people. Rén, cóng, gè. Hey look, you're reading Chinese characters. Now you know all of these hàn zì. Congratulations, you are on your way to becoming literate in Chinese. And don't forget to download the review worksheet and quiz sheet. In our next lesson, we'll learn three more characters. Alright, xià zì jiàn. And click here if you want to learn with our entire yoyo Chinese character course. In it, we'll cover all 300 of the most basic and commonly used Chinese characters. Thanks for watching and xià zì jiàn. Zài jiàn.