Introduction to Chinese Characters and their History

Hello, I'm Yishuang from HarveyMandarin.com. In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to Chinese characters and their history. Chinese characters have a rich history that goes back thousands of years, and most Chinese characters have clues to their meaning in the way they are written. To help understand Chinese characters, I'm going to introduce you to three common modern characters, and we'll take a look at how these characters evolved from ancient times into what they are today. Then, in my next lesson, we'll learn more about the different ways Chinese characters are constructed, and I'll show you some tricks and tips to help you memorize them. We'll start by taking a closer look at these three characters. This character means person, this character means tree, and this character means horse. These characters are all pictographs. In other words, they are drawings of the objects they represent. It might be hard to see how they are drawings of a person, tree, and a horse. That's because they have changed and been simplified over time. So, let's start by taking a look at some of the earliest known Chinese writing. Here, you can see an example of oracle bone script. Oracle bone script dates to the late Shang dynasty in 1300 BCE, over 3000 years ago. These characters were carved onto bones that were used for telling fortunes. Remember the three characters I showed you earlier that mean person, tree, and horse? Here are ancient forms of those characters written in oracle bone script. This is person, this is tree, and this is horse. Taking a closer look at these ancient characters, we can see that the character for person evolved from a drawing that shows a person viewed from the side. And the character for tree comes from a drawing that shows a tree's branches and its roots. These two characters are similar to the modern characters. We can also see that the ancient form of the character for horse is a drawing of a horse. Oracle bone script was written by carving or scratching the characters into bones and turtle shells. Because of this, the lines tend to be thin and angular. Also, the pictographs are simplified as much as possible to make them easier to carve onto a hard surface. Oracle bone script evolved into seal script. Seal script dates to the year 1000 BCE. There were several variants of seal script which were developed in the kingdoms that existed in China prior to the Qin dynasty. Seal script was simplified and standardized by Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of the Qin dynasty. You might not know his name, but he created the Great Wall of China, and the terracotta warriors were made for his tomb. The seal script standardized by Qin Shi Huang is known as small seal script. It uses thin curved lines and is still used today for decorative purposes and creating seals for signing artwork such as paintings, pottery, and calligraphy. Here are the characters for person, tree, and horse written in seal script. You can see how the writing was made into a form that flows much easier. Person and tree are still recognizable. The horse may be harder to see, although it is now easier to write. Here is an example of regular script, which was developed during the end of the Han dynasty and dates to around the year 200. Other than simplified Chinese characters, which I'll discuss next, regular script is the final form of Chinese characters. Regular script characters are also what we call traditional Chinese characters and are still used today in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. In regular script, the characters don't have rounded lines anymore, and the structure of the characters makes them easier to write quickly and uniformly. Here are the characters for person, tree, and horse written in regular script, also known as traditional Chinese characters. The characters for person and tree are the same as the characters I showed you at the start of this lesson. The character for horse has a similar outline, but it requires more brush strokes or pen strokes to write it. The most recent change to Chinese characters is known as simplified Chinese characters, which were developed by mainland China starting in the 1950s to help improve literacy. Simplified Chinese characters reduce the number of strokes necessary to write a character, and are often based on simpler historical characters or common shorthands for writing the characters. Here is the poem Jingye Si, written during the Tang dynasty by Li Bai, the most famous poet in China. Here you see it written using simplified Chinese characters. And here is the same poem written using regular script, also known as traditional Chinese characters. Only the characters in red are different. Also, the poem is pronounced the same way, no matter whether you use simplified Chinese characters or traditional Chinese characters. They are just a way of writing. Again, here is the poem written using simplified Chinese characters, and here it is with traditional Chinese characters. Going back to our chart that shows the evolution of Chinese characters, the first three I showed you at the top of this chart are actually simplified Chinese characters. Here you can see the simplified characters for person and tree are the same as the regular script characters. Of these three, only the character for horse was changed. I've gotten lots of questions about simplified versus traditional Chinese characters. So just to clarify, nowadays there are two standards for writing Chinese characters. Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, and traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Simplified Chinese characters were designed to make it easier for people to learn to read and write Chinese. However, they don't affect the spoken language. Also, as I mentioned, only some characters were simplified. Around 30% of the most common characters used in daily life are simplified, and the rest remain the same as traditional characters. OK, in this lesson, we learned about the history of Chinese characters and how the characters for person, tree, and horse evolved from ancient times into modern Chinese characters. In my next lesson, we'll learn about the other kinds of Chinese characters as well as how to understand and memorize them. We'll also learn some of the ways Chinese characters give you hints about their meanings and even their pronunciation. Before ending this lesson, I would like to take some time to thank Shahin from California and Lenka from Spain for supporting my YouTube channel. Thank you so much! 谢谢你们! If you would like to make a contribution to my YouTube channel, please follow the link at the end of this video. OK, that's all for this lesson. I hope you have found this lesson useful. Did you enjoy it? Please click like below and leave me a comment. If you are interested in private Chinese lessons, please visit my website HarbinMandarin.com and send me a message. I'll see you guys next time. 再见!