Chinese Symbols for Weather & Food

Series Summary

In Chinese writing, a character, or symbol is used to represent each individual syllable. There are over 47,000 Chinese characters in total, however many of these are rarely used, and the average person would need to know only about 4000 characters to be literate. Most modern Chinese words contain more than one syllable and therefore require multiple characters to write out. However, a person knowing the meanings of individual characters can often infer the general meaning of a word. In this free video series on Chinese words and phrases, learn to write words in Chinese like single, typical, raise, animal, chief, forward and cut. Use these words to further a study of this ancient and beautiful language which uses symbols and characters to describe words and phrases.

Video Transcript

"Chinese writing is very different from most other languages in the world. In the Chinese writing system, Chinese symbols represent each character which corresponds to a single spoken syllable. A majority of words in all modern varieties of Chinese require two or more characters to write. Many Chinese characters were adopted according to their meaning by the Japanese and Korean languages to represent native words, disregarding pronunciation altogether. Chinese characters are also considered to be the world's longest continuously used writing system."