Tag Archives: chinese characters
100 Most Common Chinese Characters (21-40) Posted by sasha on Jul 17, 2014
Keep going through the 100 most common Chinese characters with us in the 2nd video covering #s 21-40: 为 – wèi for, because of 子 – zǐ child, son 和 – hé and, together, with 你 – nǐ you 地 – dì earth, ground, position, place 出 – chū go out 道 – dào way…
20 Most Common Chinese Characters Posted by sasha on Jun 30, 2014
A few months ago, I wrote about the 100 most common Chinese characters. While that post is certainly useful, I decided it might be more beneficial for new Chinese learners to follow along on this list with videos. This way, you can focus more on the pronunciation of these characters and learn them in groups…
100 Most Common Chinese Characters Posted by sasha on Nov 7, 2013
As most of you may know, Chinese is a language of characters (汉字 – hàn zì). In total, there are tens of thousands of different characters. Don’t let that intimidate you, though – if you know a few thousand, you’ll be just fine. It’s important to remember, however, that most words in Chinese are made…
Best of Transparent Chinese Series Posted by sasha on May 29, 2013
Throughout my time blogging for Transparent Chinese, I’ve put together many different series of posts. From music, to love, to history, to Chinese idioms, and much, much more, a lot of topics have been discussed here over the years. In case you’ve missed any of them, here’s an easy-to-follow guide to a few of the…
What’s in a Chinese Character? (Vol. 3) Posted by sasha on Aug 23, 2012
It’s been a while since we’ve taken a closer look at the complexity of Chinese characters. To get you up to speed, here are the links to Volume 1 and Volume 2. So far, we’ve examined quite a few characters dealing with people. Today, we’ll focus more on nature, as we look at the history…
What’s in a Chinese Character? (Vol. 2) Posted by sasha on Mar 3, 2012
It’s been a while since we talked about Chinese characters (find Vol. 1 here), so let’s look at a few more examples. Last time, we looked at the character for person (人 – rén), so now let’s take a closer look at a person. Take a look in the mirror at your beautiful face (面…
What’s in a Chinese Character? (Vol. 1) Posted by sasha on Dec 2, 2011
For foreigners studying Chinese, one of the most difficult aspects can be reading and writing Chinese characters (汉字 – hàn zì), which number in the tens of thousands. Functional literacy in the language requires a knowledge of about 3-4,000 characters. If you know this many, you should be able to read a newspaper (报纸 –…