汉字 – Part One

So, last week I started my Mandarin class at university. We didn’t learn much but it was fun! We mostly worked on trying to practice the pronunciation of the four tones so that was pretty cool. The teacher seems friendly enough ^_^ Anyway! I was reading the syllabus and in the exam we have to write in Chinese! Scary scary! Anyways, I wanted to really practice my Chinese writing so I bought a couple of books and have been practicing. The pictures show my first try! If you know how to write them then feel free to give feedback on how bad they look!

I should note that they are the simplified characters as the Chinese government, during the Cultural Revolution, found that a large majority of people were illiterate. So they set about simplifying some of the complicated characters in order to help aid literacy. Not every character was simplified and there are still large amounts of people that use the traditional characters (in Hong Kong and Taiwan for example) but, as we are learning Standard Mandarin, we are learning the simplified characters.

This picture shows the rows I wrote when practicing! I bought a notebook that has squared paper to try and help but I still have problems writing sadly Anyway, from top to bottom they read: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you, you (polite), good, please (then please again, the first line of please is the traditional version; can you see the difference?), ask, honourable, surname. Some of the characters have more than one meaning but I only listed one.

I think the characters are so beautiful. I love how they are combined into new meanings etc. It’s a very… abstract and conceptual way of writing, totally different from using an alphabet. It’s like you are writing in ideas and not words. It’s very beautiful.