Chinese characters are part of a
beautiful language, but to outsiders can be difficult to learn. A Chinese
person would know 20,000 characters, but only 1,000 are used frequently.
Knowing 200 will let a traveller get by, to work out road signs, menus, time tables.
Shaolan goes through 8 basic characters and explains how to chain them
together to form more complicated characters
Put 2 people next to each other and it
represents follow. Put 3 people in the same character and they are a
crowd. You can continue to chain images together to get more complicated
characters:
From the first 8 radicals (parts of a
character), we have formed 30 characters. We can then chain 2 characters
together to form phrases. For example a fire mountain is a volcano,
Japan is the land of the rising sun, so
sun character combined with foundation. If you take these characters and add
‘person’ character afterwards, it becomes Japanese person.
Chinese emperors used to send their
political opponents across the mountains, to exile – so mountains represent
exile. An opening (mouth) that leads to exile is the exit.
This was a much more interesting way of
learning it. To see how the characters are formed makes it more memorable than
rote learning.
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