I’m Chinese, and my childhood was spent hammering these characters into my brain. This system of writing is daunting even for native speakers. But while there are many characters, the number is finite, and as I gradually learnt more and more of them, the beauty of my language revealed itself to me. It has opened the door to countless amazing books and ancient texts, and I thank my past self every day for spending all that hard work and tears drilling these characters so that I may benefit from it today.
@@Masterpsychoo almost each word is a different symbol or character, native speakers sometimes may have problems identifying some less used characters.
As a forgeiner whos learning chinese , characters personally arent too hard for me lol , in my opinion speaking / tones and pronunciation are the hardest
I just started learning Mandarin a couple weeks ago, and while it's a challenge, I'm in love. This video actually did make it more approachable; I thought characters just had meaning. Such an amazing language! The tones are my biggest difficulty.
Like , they talk about Mortal Kombat like a westerner, and when they get to the character's name, 'Shang Tsung', they sound like a foreigner...as if it were their first language? Me too.
Wow this is perfect timing, I'm studying chinese in Taiwan, and I've always loved the traditional characters because of the radicals and beautiful strokes 致每一個現在學習中文的人；加油加油！！！
lol I'm a simplified speaker because my memory is really bad and I don't think I could handle remembering all those characters. I do know a few basic ones, such as 鳥，門，馬，and 兒.
As a native speaking ABC I'd say the best way to learn chinese is to read and listen (to TV with subtitles) a lot. There are no shortcuts given the complexity and volume of characters, although the radicals can assist with a clue to meaning or sound when you already have a good idea of the rough meaning through context or knowledge of the remaining language.
@@ndnxneh yeah as a chinese who's not on mainland or speak chinese normally, They don't teach chinese like this AT ALL. They will give you a frame to repeat writing to remember them instead.
4:11 You forgot to show in the map that Vietnamese has what we call "từ Hán Việt" or Sino-VIetnamese words, which make up about 60% of Vietnamese words due to deep influence from the North in the past like Japanese and Korean.
Regional variants of Chinese aren't 1:1 mappings of Standard Chinese, it's just that everyone writes in Mandarin. When you actually use characters that match what people are saying, the writing can look a bit different.
My sis and I confuse each other constantly since we mix our English and Canto constantly. Our parents are also Chinese, but grew up in Peru so then Spanish is also thrown into our household
A really informative, beginner-friendly video. On a personal note, I've been interested in writing/reading Chinese characters but haven't been sure how to begin. This video is seriously helpful, thank you! Edit: Credit to the voice-over actor and the animators as well!
I remember learning Mandarin Chinese when I was in a language immersion school, I remember being so fascinated with the fact that some of the characters that I was learning were intended to look like what they symbolise, like 人, 水, and so much more.
well, to be precise, not only the dialects of the same 'word'/'character' have different pronounciation, sometimes the character representing the meaning could also change in colloquial use. For example, the word 'eat' in cantonese is 食, while the one in mandarin is 吃. On the other hand, the grammar words of different dialects are also different. Take the examples presented in the video again, you would use the words 吃了 to show ate or eaten, while in cantonese, the words would become 食咗
american born chinese here who regrets not spending more time learning the writing when younger. I can read some stuff but if you hand me an article or book in Chinese to read you will hear lots of "什么“s 🙃
I grew up with a family that taught traditonal chinese and each worksheet had the original characters from thousands of years ago and how it had evolved over time. I often tell people how ironic it feels still not to be able to read chinese characters only recognizing key ones
i came here expecting to be able to write more chinese letters but it just told me stuff i already knew. nevertheless, a great video!!! Also, as a native speaker of mandarin i still find it very very difficult to write most characters as theres just so many. i am able to read them and understand it the moment i see it but i cant write it off the top of my head
The animation is so pretty and well-made! I am from Taiwan, speaking Mandrin and Taiwanese. These information and pronunciation are very correct. BTW, Vietnamese also uses Chinese in the past. Their ancient buildings or temples also had traditional Chinese words.
guys i think by taiwanese he means traditional chinese there are some phrases that are said differently in mainland china and taiwan, but still i would consider them part of the same language
2:13 In real writing, it never stand along indeed. But in daily chat, it can stand along. It’s a bad word, if it stands along. Because it sounds like another word - 「操」. You can search it.
so... for fxxk, the actual chinese character is a combination of 入 and 肉 (which means to enter the flesh), but because the words 操 and 草 sound similar, they are used in daily chat to replace the actual character. and i also wanted to say, there are infinite ways of cursing in chinese, usually the best way is a combination of a random relative + random body part + an adjective still the most commonly used one is just fxxk your mom
The narrator means that the radical ”艸 (meaning things related to grass, or plant, such as 草 [cǎo](grass), 花 [huā] (flower))" never stands alone but is always a part of a word/character, not meaning the word "草 [cǎo](grass).” As to the character "操 [cāo]," it means " to hold, to drill, to exercise, to act, to do, to take in hand, to keep, to manage," and so on.
I studied Mandarin for 2 semesters in college back in the 1970's. A few years back, I came across an old text book from that class with pages of hand written homework (my hand writing) with a few corrections from my professor. The irony is that today, even though I wrote it, I can read it anymore. Or speak it. But I guess that shouldn't surprise me since I can't handle calculus anymore either. Dare I say - it's all Chinese to me now?
I mean, 魚 is a redical itself indeed, but I don't think the "fire" radical that you claimed was actually "fire". The four dots at the bottom of the fish, though often symbolized as fired, is actually a Pictographic based on the tail of fish.
I’m very grateful that the Phoenicians took a different approach; so many languages encoded with maybe 30 symbols and some accent marks. I use the contrast between the Chinese and Phoenician systems to explain RISK processors to non-technical people.
Chinese: Why have a writing system when you can just draw what you mean? *a bunch of time passes* Chinese: Sh*t Japanese: Well now we have a writing system which is easy to learn and we can mirror what we say on paper. But it's quite annoying, it's hard to see the edges of the words, I wish there were some kind of separation Europe: Why not use " "? Japanese: What do you mean, there is nothing there, if I separate them with nothing, then it's still the same... Chinese: *Walks by* Japanese: 🤩Is that a couple of thousand complicated looking characters? If we begin every word with those, then it'll be obvious where a new word starts 🤯
Fun Fact : except for the Chinese , Korean and Japanese characters , all of the world alphabets are derived from a single alphabet known as the Proto Sinaitic Alphabet , which originated in Sinai peninsula in Egypt.
@@foxnebula145 The Aryans invaded India and destroyed the Indus script which was invented by the Indians themselves. After destroying the Indians' own writing, the Aryans used the Brahmi script (Sanskrit), which also came from the Sinaitic script.
As a non-Chinese speaker, I have to say, Chinese (And Hyerogliphic scripts in general) is one of the most confusing and alien things ever... But I know that it's one of the most known languages on Earth, possibly only behind English, simply thanks to how populous China is.
if you know the logic, then you can read the characters, it's the reverse of English, you have to learn the tone and pronunciation for them first to know the language
04:00 Simplified Chinese was not created by the Chinese Communist Party; they merely completed the work. The simplification of Chinese characters had occasionally appeared in informal writings over the past few centuries. In the 1920s, Chinese scholars began advocating for the formal simplification of characters to make writing easier. However, due to the continuous state of war in China over the following thirty years, this work could not be completed. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Communist Party finally finished this task and began promoting it。
As a Taiwanese, I suggest that anyone who wants to learn Chinese should start with Traditional Chinese. Once you learn Traditional Chinese, you can directly understand Simplified Chinese, as well as Japanese Kanji 😉
That’s like saying You f you want to learn to sew on a button, just learn to design, draft and tailor a suit. Sure, you’ll learn to sew on a button, but if it’s not something you want to devote that level of dedication to, maybe just learn the button.
But people from mainland have no problem understanding traditional Chinese. If they just learn simplified Chinese, which is sooo much easier, they will naturally be able to understand both. For example, 憂鬱的台灣烏龜 vs 忧郁的台湾乌龟. Imagine how much harder it is to learn and write the former.
Not necessarily. This is a Japanese Kanji 峠 (とう げ) (mountain pass), but there is no such Chinese character in either traditional or simplified version of Chinese characters.
@@etbuch4873 there is. In ancient times, it means "calories". and also in the game genshin impact, this word was adapted into chinese to mean the same thing as the japanese kanji.
Vietnamese also used Chinese characters, and developed similar writing system called Nôm, we only switched to Latin characters much later in 19th century and it became official writing scripture today.
@@karaki369 i remember seeing from somewhere that 喃字 was a form of chinese that the vietnam people developed by themselves by combining chinese characters and their own pronouonciations, but it is so complicated that it was never really widely used in vietnam
As a Chinese person, I've always wanted to learn another language as elegant as Chinese. I tried Korean, but it's actually not as "elegant" as it seems. So now I'm not sure what to learn next.
Im from Hong Kong, and I always try to read Japanese without knowing anything about it, for simple message like road sign/ description/warning behind a product, the guessing usually works quite well, I tested it once and I find myself understand 90%of Japanese newspaper headlines since they tend to be succinct and use more kanji, but for something more sophisticated/complicated like a book or a paragraph, it starts to fail very quickly.
@@pinkgreenmelon2209 in baby talk? Its so crazy, I was told you need to be able to read at least 7000 symbols in order just to read a simple news paper, being very basic in nature, compared to 26 letters, 10 numerals including zero, and some puctuation marks, the chinese system can only be called an enoumous monster, purposefully complicated in order to reduce literacy, english has its problems no doubt, the silent letters and exceptions, and weird spelling and pronouciatuons can baffle even native speakers, but in terms of being able to convey vast amounts of information in simple tight packets known as words, is truly remarkable.
I’ve always heard, and if you look it up too, that usually knowing 2k-3k characters is enough to read a newspaper. Japanese is pretty much the same case. Even though many thousands of kanji (Chinese characters) technically exist in Japanese, knowing ~2,000 is usually what you need to be literate from what I hear
Also Chinese isn’t really “purposely complicated” per se and I very much doubt it’s meant to reduce literacy. Just look at literacy levels in Japan and China. I believe the Chinese government actually considered removing Chinese characters and just using the alphabet at one point, but the problem is that there are so many homonyms in Chinese and Japanese, which makes abandoning Chinese characters incredibly difficult. The story of the lion-eating poet is a good example.
For context, this is how that story would be written with only the alphabet ^: « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ » Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì.
I wish it was like this for japanese. I hate learning japanese kanji. Sometimes the radicals in a kanji approximate what it means, and sometimes it's something unrelated For example, 氵[water] and 中 [middle] meaning offing/off the coast in the ocean 沖. Or, 夕 [evening] and 口 [mouth] meaning name 名 It's so complicated!!!
I AM A CHINESE IN MACAU, CHINA. I LEARN THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE CHARACTERS. ALTHOUGH, THE CHINESE PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES SPEAKERS, WE USE EXACTLY THE SAME WRITING LANGUAGE, CHINESE CHARACTERS. YOU CAN LEARN THE SIMPLE/EASY CHINESE CHARACTERS FIRSTLY, SUCH AS 一=ONE 二=TWO 三=THREE 日=SUN 月=MOON 木=TREE/WOOD 人=HUMAN/PERSON/PEOPLE THEN, LEARNING THE COMPLEX/DIFFICULT CHINESE CHARACTERS, SUCH AS 紅=RED 黃=YELLOW 綠=GREEN 藍=BLUE 紫=PURPLE 龍=DRAGON 鳳=PHOENIX 國=STATE/NATION/COUNTRY
@@reubenong8728 That's not true. You're making it sound like SC was invited yesterday with random squiggles replacing actual meaning components. In reality, chinese characters have undergone centuries of simplification, mainly through cursive.
Hello, can I download these videos and translate them into another language and post them? I'll also leave a link to the actual video in the video post.
*_1_* The earliest evidence of writing is from 10k to 5.5k YA in Mesopotamia. *_2_* The oldest known examples of Old Chinese come from about 3.3k YA. *_3_* These are the 10 hardest languages to learn (descending order): Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Georgian, and Navajo. *_4_* English is the world lingua franca with 1.5 billion speakers. 💕☮🌎🌌
If you’re Christian or understand traditional religions in Eastern Asia will help you understand Chinese characters far easier. 東 East 田 garden 木 tree 人 person Genesis 2:8-9 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. Also the character meaning ocean 洋 (yang) Although you said water and sheep it actually has a deeper meaning 氵䒑 手 liquid open hand.. like gathering water from the ocean. Rituals are scattered all throughout Chinese characters… 金 (gold): 人 (person) 王 (priest/king) 工 (work) 干 (dry) 士 (earth) 䒑 (open) Chinese Narrative:(Gold talismans for the dead) Biblical Narrative: Genesis 3:22-24 “Now you must work the earth” 木 (tree/wood): 人 (person) 十 (cross/ten/spirit) ｜ (stick) (Joss sticks) Chinese Narrative: Incense for spirits Biblical Narrative: Luke 17:11-19 土 (earth): 工 (work) 二 (two) 丨 (stick) (Rice bowl offering for the dead) Chinese Narrative: Two chopsticks placed in a mound of rice for the dead on the ground/burial mounds Biblical Narrative: Genesis 3:22-24 Adam and Eve (two sticks) forced to till/work the earth
I’m Chinese, and my childhood was spent hammering these characters into my brain. This system of writing is daunting even for native speakers. But while there are many characters, the number is finite, and as I gradually learnt more and more of them, the beauty of my language revealed itself to me. It has opened the door to countless amazing books and ancient texts, and I thank my past self every day for spending all that hard work and tears drilling these characters so that I may benefit from it today.
How many years did it take to master written chinese? Most children learn to use the roman alphabet in three to four years around here.
Chinese feels like the most primitive written language that currently exists
@@sharzo7728 it is very complex and logical, so it is not primitive just because it's not an alphabet
@HayashiManabu - 🥰
@@Masterpsychoo almost each word is a different symbol or character, native speakers sometimes may have problems identifying some less used characters.
As a Chinese myself, I felt a sudden thrill because I just realized how daunting this video made it look like for a foreigner to learn Chinese.
As a forgeiner whos learning chinese , characters personally arent too hard for me lol , in my opinion speaking / tones and pronunciation are the hardest
Actually, this video made it even more approachable.
I just started learning Mandarin a couple weeks ago, and while it's a challenge, I'm in love. This video actually did make it more approachable; I thought characters just had meaning. Such an amazing language! The tones are my biggest difficulty.
Why would that be thrilling? You dont want others learning your native language?
@@Flyingsearat Agree. I remember characters better than I memorise the tones for reading those characters
I love when people read chinese with the proper pronunciation in the middle of an english sentence
As a native Chinese person, I must say her pronunciation is totally correct!!!🎉
Her name is pen pen Chen and doing narration on mandarin related topics for years.
Bruh I'm fluent in Chinese and English but switching mid sentence messes with my brain so much
Like , they talk about Mortal Kombat like a westerner, and when they get to the character's name, 'Shang Tsung', they sound like a foreigner...as if it were their first language?
Me too.
Switching between Mandarin and English is just such a Singaporean thing to do that's how we get Singlish (also mixed in Malay)
Tips for learning a new language.
1. Start with foul words.
2. Explore more foul words.
3. Explore more new words and start learning.
Well, recently the word 'sun' '日' has taken up the meaning of the f-word. 😉
No
3. Compose rude limericks...
@@DarkBladeShdwyes
@@cheng8516I did not know that
Wow this is perfect timing, I'm studying chinese in Taiwan, and I've always loved the traditional characters because of the radicals and beautiful strokes 致每一個現在學習中文的人；加油加油！！！
lol I'm a simplified speaker because my memory is really bad and I don't think I could handle remembering all those characters. I do know a few basic ones, such as 鳥，門，馬，and 兒.
Just looks like you're telling me to add oil lol
@@nichan008 加油 does mean to add oil, it means keep going!! you got this!
謝謝 謝謝
As a native speaking ABC I'd say the best way to learn chinese is to read and listen (to TV with subtitles) a lot. There are no shortcuts given the complexity and volume of characters, although the radicals can assist with a clue to meaning or sound when you already have a good idea of the rough meaning through context or knowledge of the remaining language.
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” ~ Lao Tzu 🎑
I'm an American born Chinese and this actually made Chinese words make more sense!
He meant to say that this makes Chinese words make more sense to him.
@@ndnxneh yeah as a chinese who's not on mainland or speak chinese normally, They don't teach chinese like this AT ALL.
They will give you a frame to repeat writing to remember them instead.
난 淸眞飮食 먹는 걸 좋아하거든
go back chang.
@@AnonymousUser-og8jj ?
The evolution of Chinese characters and the poetry protesting pinyin (most famously "The Lion-Eating Poet") will always fascinate me.
施氏食獅史 ？
@@DNAcat yeah
无人日常会那样说和用词。
4:11 You forgot to show in the map that Vietnamese has what we call "từ Hán Việt" or Sino-VIetnamese words, which make up about 60% of Vietnamese words due to deep influence from the North in the past like Japanese and Korean.
Regional variants of Chinese aren't 1:1 mappings of Standard Chinese, it's just that everyone writes in Mandarin. When you actually use characters that match what people are saying, the writing can look a bit different.
"close enough"
My sis and I confuse each other constantly since we mix our English and Canto constantly. Our parents are also Chinese, but grew up in Peru so then Spanish is also thrown into our household
That sounds somewhat interesting, confusing, and fascinating to hear
Student of Japanese here...I recognized so many of these Kanji.
kanji 漢字 hanzi, literally means Chinese characters
Real
I studied Mandarin and whenever I read Japanese it looks like squiggle cat squiggle noodle squiggle sun.
@@pinkgreenmelon2209 yeah it looks like characters thrown in a sentence with hiragana
kanji literally come from hanzi, so naturally you can read some of it
the animation and art in this episode is SO pretty !!!
The fact they pronounced the words correctly really show how dedicated they r 😭😭
Learning Chinese by myself. Simplified writing really eases newbies like me. Traditional is too difficult to remember.
Shout out to the animation / music team, amazing work!
A very Educative video.
This is very Enlightening.
A really informative, beginner-friendly video. On a personal note, I've been interested in writing/reading Chinese characters but haven't been sure how to begin. This video is seriously helpful, thank you!
Edit: Credit to the voice-over actor and the animators as well!
I would get a beginner book, don't focus on the vocabulary, learn the characters and tone etc first
The narator seems like chinese. The pronounciation is correct.
The narrator* seems to* be* Chinese* ...
I remember learning Mandarin Chinese when I was in a language immersion school, I remember being so fascinated with the fact that some of the characters that I was learning were intended to look like what they symbolise, like 人, 水, and so much more.
well, to be precise, not only the dialects of the same 'word'/'character' have different pronounciation, sometimes the character representing the meaning could also change in colloquial use. For example, the word 'eat' in cantonese is 食, while the one in mandarin is 吃. On the other hand, the grammar words of different dialects are also different. Take the examples presented in the video again, you would use the words 吃了 to show ate or eaten, while in cantonese, the words would become 食咗
interesting how Cantonese is like have you had the food instead of have you eaten, different way of saying it
When studying Japanese it's funny to see the same characters used in Chinese but they usually have different meanings.
american born chinese here who regrets not spending more time learning the writing when younger. I can read some stuff but if you hand me an article or book in Chinese to read you will hear lots of "什么“s 🙃
The word written at 1:53 contains all basic strokes a character can have. Its meaning? 'Infinity' or 'Eternal'.
Chinese is a beautiful language, both written and spoken. I can't wait to learn it ^^
I grew up with a family that taught traditonal chinese and each worksheet had the original characters from thousands of years ago and how it had evolved over time. I often tell people how ironic it feels still not to be able to read chinese characters only recognizing key ones
i came here expecting to be able to write more chinese letters but it just told me stuff i already knew. nevertheless, a great video!!! Also, as a native speaker of mandarin i still find it very very difficult to write most characters as theres just so many. i am able to read them and understand it the moment i see it but i cant write it off the top of my head
the animation is so good, love it
Thank you for teaching me the language of our future masters
The animation is so pretty and well-made!
I am from Taiwan, speaking Mandrin and Taiwanese. These information and pronunciation are very correct.
BTW, Vietnamese also uses Chinese in the past. Their ancient buildings or temples also had traditional Chinese words.
Taiwanese is not a language. It's just a dialect of the southern Min, or Banlamgu.
You mean Taiwanese Hokkien
guys i think by taiwanese he means traditional chinese
there are some phrases that are said differently in mainland china and taiwan, but still i would consider them part of the same language
2:13 In real writing, it never stand along indeed. But in daily chat, it can stand along. It’s a bad word, if it stands along. Because it sounds like another word - 「操」. You can search it.
How do you know this?
so... for fxxk, the actual chinese character is a combination of 入 and 肉 (which means to enter the flesh), but because the words 操 and 草 sound similar, they are used in daily chat to replace the actual character.
and i also wanted to say, there are infinite ways of cursing in chinese, usually the best way is a combination of a random relative + random body part + an adjective
still the most commonly used one is just fxxk your mom
The narrator means that the radical ”艸 (meaning things related to grass, or plant, such as 草 [cǎo](grass), 花 [huā] (flower))" never stands alone but is always a part of a word/character, not meaning the word "草 [cǎo](grass).”
As to the character "操 [cāo]," it means " to hold, to drill, to exercise, to act, to do, to take in hand, to keep, to manage," and so on.
I studied Mandarin for 2 semesters in college back in the 1970's. A few years back, I came across an old text book from that class with pages of hand written homework (my hand writing) with a few corrections from my professor. The irony is that today, even though I wrote it, I can read it anymore. Or speak it. But I guess that shouldn't surprise me since I can't handle calculus anymore either. Dare I say - it's all Chinese to me now?
@TED-Ed Please correct the wrong example of 魚 , which is a radical instead of a character with the "fire" radical at the bottom.
No. 魚(Fish) is related to water. And the radical can also mean water
I mean, 魚 is a redical itself indeed, but I don't think the "fire" radical that you claimed was actually "fire". The four dots at the bottom of the fish, though often symbolized as fired, is actually a Pictographic based on the tail of fish.
Guys, regardless of the meaning (I might be wrong about the "fire"), I still prefer it being corrected and in the end it's a wrong example.
@@vincentjoseph4533 oh. I just looked it up and 魚 is a radical itself. Never thought about it that way😅
The four dots on the bottom like 烈然魚 in Japanese is called れっか (fire radical)
感谢大家学习我们的语言历史，期待与你们交流
I’m very grateful that the Phoenicians took a different approach; so many languages encoded with maybe 30 symbols and some accent marks. I use the contrast between the Chinese and Phoenician systems to explain RISK processors to non-technical people.
as a Vietnamese, I want to restore the "Chinese character system" of Vietnamese called "chữ Nho" instead of continuing to use the Latin alphabet
3:00 i just got a heart attack thinking there is a massive insect flying around my ear
Beautiful language! The characters are works of art.
I always thought of learning Chinese ,I still do, but no timeeeeeeeeee
Chinese: Why have a writing system when you can just draw what you mean?
*a bunch of time passes*
Chinese: Sh*t
Japanese: Well now we have a writing system which is easy to learn and we can mirror what we say on paper. But it's quite annoying, it's hard to see the edges of the words, I wish there were some kind of separation
Europe: Why not use " "?
Japanese: What do you mean, there is nothing there, if I separate them with nothing, then it's still the same...
Chinese: *Walks by*
Japanese: 🤩Is that a couple of thousand complicated looking characters? If we begin every word with those, then it'll be obvious where a new word starts 🤯
很棒的视频❤谢谢你向人们讲述汉字！ted永远是最棒哒！🎉
Fun Fact : except for the Chinese , Korean and Japanese characters , all of the world alphabets are derived from a single alphabet known as the Proto Sinaitic Alphabet , which originated in Sinai peninsula in Egypt.
Even indonésian
what about Mayan??
What about sanskirt?
@@foxnebula145 Devanagari also derived from proto sinaitic glyphs.
@@foxnebula145 The Aryans invaded India and destroyed the Indus script which was invented by the Indians themselves. After destroying the Indians' own writing, the Aryans used the Brahmi script (Sanskrit), which also came from the Sinaitic script.
Do one about hangul too! It was specifically created so that anyone could be able to read and write!
there's no secret or trick, it's just rote memorization it's why it's the hardest written language
I think using letters is a vastly superior idea.
I see why Chinese people are so smart, even their language is complicated
Not complicated, but complex.
The writing system is beautiful, but it borders on the impossible for me.
I’m illiterate so this is a nice short explanation of the characters for me. The differently fonts do make it tricky to read.
"Did yall know Chinese actually originated in Korea" said every Korean I've ever met.
they don't even know that Hanja means Chinese characters
You should include the link to the Chinese Ted-Ed.
Too oversimplified, those who studied can agree
What's missing for you?
@jinjunliu2401 When you put two words together, it can mean other things
I’m Chinese by blood, but taken away from the country when I was little. I never had the chance to learn my native language but I’m trying now
As a non-Chinese speaker, I have to say, Chinese (And Hyerogliphic scripts in general) is one of the most confusing and alien things ever... But I know that it's one of the most known languages on Earth, possibly only behind English, simply thanks to how populous China is.
*confusing. And also it is not only spoke in China
ABC is boring and so basic
@@kaidanalenko5222 and yet through, though, tough have -ough but the pronunciation is different
if you know the logic, then you can read the characters, it's the reverse of English, you have to learn the tone and pronunciation for them first to know the language
That makes it so much simpler :-)
04:00 Simplified Chinese was not created by the Chinese Communist Party; they merely completed the work. The simplification of Chinese characters had occasionally appeared in informal writings over the past few centuries. In the 1920s, Chinese scholars began advocating for the formal simplification of characters to make writing easier. However, due to the continuous state of war in China over the following thirty years, this work could not be completed. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Communist Party finally finished this task and began promoting it。
what a wonderful video.
Thanks a lot!!!
Sugestion to the next history video: The Los Angeles ritos of 1992
I remember those. They occurred in the downtown area and subsequently became known as the Do-ritos.
This made me want to learn Chinese again
Fantastic introduction about Chinese characters, great work!!
That’s fantastic! This animation explanations how did Chinese be created.
Such a beautiful language
Loved the illustrations ❤
Wow that makes it so much simpler to understand....................................................
top quality educational content. thank you TED-Ed.
As a Taiwanese, I suggest that anyone who wants to learn Chinese should start with Traditional Chinese. Once you learn Traditional Chinese, you can directly understand Simplified Chinese, as well as Japanese Kanji 😉
That’s like saying You f you want to learn to sew on a button, just learn to design, draft and tailor a suit. Sure, you’ll learn to sew on a button, but if it’s not something you want to devote that level of dedication to, maybe just learn the button.
But people from mainland have no problem understanding traditional Chinese. If they just learn simplified Chinese, which is sooo much easier, they will naturally be able to understand both. For example, 憂鬱的台灣烏龜 vs 忧郁的台湾乌龟. Imagine how much harder it is to learn and write the former.
@@CharlieCharlie88 yes, i also hear that taiwanese people also managed to come up with a simplified form of chinese by themselves
Not necessarily. This is a Japanese Kanji 峠 (とう げ) (mountain pass), but there is no such Chinese character in either traditional or simplified version of Chinese characters.
@@etbuch4873 there is. In ancient times, it means "calories". and also in the game genshin impact, this word was adapted into chinese to mean the same thing as the japanese kanji.
You summed everything up perfectly
What about 𰻞 (bíang)?
Vietnamese also used Chinese characters, and developed similar writing system called Nôm, we only switched to Latin characters much later in 19th century and it became official writing scripture today.
support 喃遺産保存會 for preserving Hannom heritage.
@@karaki369 i remember seeing from somewhere that 喃字 was a form of chinese that the vietnam people developed by themselves by combining chinese characters and their own pronouonciations, but it is so complicated that it was never really widely used in vietnam
As a Chinese person, I've always wanted to learn another language as elegant as Chinese. I tried Korean, but it's actually not as "elegant" as it seems. So now I'm not sure what to learn next.
This was beautiful to the senses
I find it wild that a Chinese person could theoretically read a note in Japanese but not understand what the writer was saying.
Im from Hong Kong, and I always try to read Japanese without knowing anything about it, for simple message like road sign/ description/warning behind a product, the guessing usually works quite well,
I tested it once and I find myself understand 90%of Japanese newspaper headlines since they tend to be succinct and use more kanji,
but for something more sophisticated/complicated like a book or a paragraph, it starts to fail very quickly.
if it's not mostly characters, it would be difficult for a Chinese person, it would have to be 60% at least
The animation is so pretty and attractive✨
I wonder how they create such a smooth animation and video, which software was used?
The fact that people are still using a 10,000 character writing system in 2024, blows my mind.
Well you don’t use all 10,000, knowing 1000 characters you can converse.
@@pinkgreenmelon2209 in baby talk? Its so crazy, I was told you need to be able to read at least 7000 symbols in order just to read a simple news paper, being very basic in nature, compared to 26 letters, 10 numerals including zero, and some puctuation marks, the chinese system can only be called an enoumous monster, purposefully complicated in order to reduce literacy, english has its problems no doubt, the silent letters and exceptions, and weird spelling and pronouciatuons can baffle even native speakers, but in terms of being able to convey vast amounts of information in simple tight packets known as words, is truly remarkable.
I’ve always heard, and if you look it up too, that usually knowing 2k-3k characters is enough to read a newspaper. Japanese is pretty much the same case. Even though many thousands of kanji (Chinese characters) technically exist in Japanese, knowing ~2,000 is usually what you need to be literate from what I hear
Also Chinese isn’t really “purposely complicated” per se and I very much doubt it’s meant to reduce literacy. Just look at literacy levels in Japan and China. I believe the Chinese government actually considered removing Chinese characters and just using the alphabet at one point, but the problem is that there are so many homonyms in Chinese and Japanese, which makes abandoning Chinese characters incredibly difficult. The story of the lion-eating poet is a good example.
For context, this is how that story would be written with only the alphabet ^:
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
Thank you for this! So educational
I wish it was like this for japanese. I hate learning japanese kanji. Sometimes the radicals in a kanji approximate what it means, and sometimes it's something unrelated
For example, 氵[water] and 中 [middle] meaning offing/off the coast in the ocean 沖. Or, 夕 [evening] and 口 [mouth] meaning name 名
It's so complicated!!!
So, which is harder to master? The intricacies of Chinese characters or the chaos of English spelling?
Compare the Chinese influence over Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese to the Latin influence over languages like German and Polish...
First comment, ready to be lost.
But would you let it?
I AM A CHINESE IN MACAU, CHINA. I LEARN THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE CHARACTERS. ALTHOUGH, THE CHINESE PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT LANGUAGES SPEAKERS, WE USE EXACTLY THE SAME WRITING LANGUAGE, CHINESE CHARACTERS. YOU CAN LEARN THE SIMPLE/EASY CHINESE CHARACTERS FIRSTLY, SUCH AS
一=ONE
二=TWO
三=THREE
日=SUN
月=MOON
木=TREE/WOOD
人=HUMAN/PERSON/PEOPLE
THEN, LEARNING THE COMPLEX/DIFFICULT CHINESE CHARACTERS, SUCH AS
紅=RED
黃=YELLOW
綠=GREEN
藍=BLUE
紫=PURPLE
龍=DRAGON
鳳=PHOENIX
國=STATE/NATION/COUNTRY
Chinese characters are all about pictures and some logics, that's it easy.
That’s if it’s traditional chinese. Simplified Chinese hardly depicts the actual meaning
@@reubenong8728 that's not entirely true. It's not as cut and dry as you're depicting it.
@@reubenong8728 That's not true. You're making it sound like SC was invited yesterday with random squiggles replacing actual meaning components. In reality, chinese characters have undergone centuries of simplification, mainly through cursive.
@@reubenong8728 Why don't you learn pictogram?
pictures with a sound for each one, and it has to be correct or it's all wrong, tone and pronunciation
Think I’ll stick to the Latin alphabet thanks.
I wonder how long it will take for this written system to be abolished from everyday life
Interesting.
I get confused. Are Cantonese and Mandarin only spoken, or is the written language one of them also? And if so, which one?
Can you do one on how Hangul the Korean language was created.
I would not know where to start.
Hey ted ed, any video on formation of USSR?
- ted ed making a video on chinese: zero pronunciation mistakes
- them making a video on any slavic language: oi komrad helo hau ar u duin?
Amazing video!
我勒个豆啊，这个播音员的中文发音太标准了。The English reader's Chinese pronunciation is perfect!
Mandarin is going on my resume now
Hello, can I download these videos and translate them into another language and post them? I'll also leave a link to the actual video in the video post.
🧡 Magnanimous animation 💙
✨Interesting!✨🙂✨
As a Chinese person, I can state that this is exactly what we learn in Chinese class but in Chinese :)
I am drifting deep.
*_1_* The earliest evidence of writing is from 10k to 5.5k YA in Mesopotamia.
*_2_* The oldest known examples of Old Chinese come from about 3.3k YA.
*_3_* These are the 10 hardest languages to learn (descending order): Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Georgian, and Navajo.
*_4_* English is the world lingua franca with 1.5 billion speakers. 💕☮🌎🌌
If you’re Christian or understand traditional religions in Eastern Asia will help you understand Chinese characters far easier.
東 East
田 garden
木 tree
人 person
Genesis 2:8-9
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.
Also the character meaning ocean
洋 (yang)
Although you said water and sheep it actually has a deeper meaning
氵䒑 手 liquid open hand.. like gathering water from the ocean.
Rituals are scattered all throughout Chinese characters…
金 (gold):
人 (person)
王 (priest/king)
工 (work)
干 (dry)
士 (earth)
䒑 (open)
Chinese Narrative:(Gold talismans for the dead)
Biblical Narrative: Genesis 3:22-24
“Now you must work the earth”
木 (tree/wood):
人 (person)
十 (cross/ten/spirit)
｜ (stick)
(Joss sticks)
Chinese Narrative: Incense for spirits
Biblical Narrative: Luke 17:11-19
土 (earth):
工 (work)
二 (two)
丨 (stick)
(Rice bowl offering for the dead)
Chinese Narrative: Two chopsticks placed in a mound of rice for the dead on the ground/burial mounds
Biblical Narrative: Genesis 3:22-24
Adam and Eve (two sticks) forced to till/work the earth