Comments on: Chinese Etymology – Learning the Origins of Chinese Characters Makes Them Impossible to Forget

By: Billysan San

Billysan San — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 02:26:11 +0000

你好 Scott。
我从是 Billy。 I am an English teacher trying to teach myself Chinese.
I am Costarican by birth,my great grandpa is from China. I visited Shanghai in 2010 and I could picked up some words of the language. I love the culture and I dedicate 30 minutes every day to learn it. I really appreciate your great help. You’re doing a great job and I will pass the word along my colleagues.
谢谢。

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 25 May 2020 02:11:25 +0000

Hi thanks for this information i really love it and i would love to learn deeply mandarin and cantonese, hope you can help me

By: Mary Edwards

Mary Edwards — Sat, 09 May 2020 21:43:35 +0000

Hello Scott, I have been reading your well-written and easy to understand pages on Chinese language learning.
As much as I have over the years been fascinated by the language, it has always appeared to me to be completely unfathomable. Last year on a flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, I sat next to a young Chinese man with whom I had an interesting conversation about China, and he was good enough to show me
a few characters and explain a little about these. This broke the ice, as such, and now, with time during this lockdown, I have, amongst many other things, begun to look into learning the language and so have come across your pages which really do give a very easy to understand introduction. I am not ready to commit to a full-on study but perhaps this will be the next step, in due course. Thank you. Very much appreciated.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 13:33:55 +0000

In reply to Nkwuka Chiedu.

Hey Nkwuka, I’m glad you enjoyed the article! First to clarify, pinyin is the romanisation of Chinese. It’s the English spelling. Pinyin literally means spelled sounds. For example 日 in pinyin is spelled rì.

I think what you mean is Chinese characters (of which there are over 10,000!). Don’t worry, you definitely don’t need them all. With 2000 you will understand over 90% of written Chinese. The number one thing I can recommend you is the dictionary app Pleco for your phone. Inside the app, you can view whatever characters you need by typing the pinyin. (so type ri for 日) and it will display a list of characters. When you click into the character it displays the stroke order. (inside the “STROKE” tab in Pleco) This shows you how to write it. I would recommend that when you learn a character, you break it down into the smaller parts. For example the Chinese word for “is” 是 (shì) has 日 inside it. You can see this by clicking on the “CHARS” tab within pleco.

Start with the words you’ve already learnt in Chinese. I highly recommend learning the character when you learn a new word and trying to learn the characters for the words you’ve already learned.

Other than that, I’m developing a character course for the first 200 characters right now. If you sign up to the newletter on our website (fragrantmandarin.com) I can let you know when it’s ready! Good luck and enjoy learning your first few characters – it can be addictive! 🙂

By: Nkwuka Chiedu

Nkwuka Chiedu — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 23:26:27 +0000

Hello Scott, this article is really helpful. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful piece. Now I need your help. I’m a newbie trying to learn Mandarin Chinese and so far so good I’ve not seen resources that teach someone how to write the pinyin letters from a beginner level (I understand that there are about 2,000 pinyin characters). Can you recommend any resources that would help me learn it esp. videos so that I can rewind them from time to time when practising on my own. Thanks and kudos for your help