30 Simplest Chinese Characters Learn Your First Hanzi

Hey guys, welcome back to AB Chinese, and in this week's video we are going to go over 30 of the simplest Chinese characters that exist. Now if you're someone who's been wanting to learn Chinese characters but is kind of put off or intimidated by how seemingly complex they are, then this video was made for you. The first 25 characters we're going to go over are characters that are both easy and simple and also very commonly used in everyday life. The last five characters I kind of put in there just for fun. They are characters that are really simple to write, but they are not used quite as often. So let's get started. 我们开始吧! Our very first character is 口. This character means mouth, and it looks basically like a square. I mean, I guess a circle would have made a little bit more sense, but we really don't use circles in Chinese. Everything is made with lines. Now right off the bat, I want to point out something, and that is that in Chinese, oftentimes we'll have two sets of terms for the same thing. One of them being the term we use in everyday life, and the other term we also use in everyday life, but it's a little bit more poetic or like you use it in literature more. And in this case, 口 is the word we use more in literature, whereas 嘴巴 is the term we use in everyday life when we're talking about our mouths. But you notice that the character 嘴 also has 口 as a radical. On the left side, you'll see the little square, and this is a pattern you'll see in a lot of other characters too, where characters have something to do with your mouth, like a lot of sounds, will have the character 口 as a radical, and you'll see it on the left side of the character. Number two, we have 日. As you can see, this character basically looks like our last one, except it's got a line in the middle now. And there's two meanings associated with this character. The first is the sun. Now again, this is a term that's used more in literature, and we have another term, 太阳, for use in everyday life. And the other meaning is day. It can be combined with other characters to refer to something that has to do with a day, or for example, the day of the month, we would use 日. And I guess since we talked about the sun, we have to talk about the moon, and that is our next character, 月. This character kind of looks like the moon, especially when you consider what it used to look like, with the curvy edges and all. And it also has another dual meaning, and it's used to refer to months. So if you attach any number in front of this character, you're referring to that month of the year. For example, 四月 is the fourth month, which is April. At number four, we've got the simplest character by far, with only two strokes, and that is 人. This character means people, and I doubt you'll have a hard time remembering this one, considering it only has two strokes, and it looks like someone who's just walking or taking a jog. And just when it couldn't get any simpler, our next character is the simplest Chinese character that exists, and that is the number 一. Yes, in Chinese, one, pronounced ee, is just one horizontal stroke. And while we're at it, I'm also going to include 二, r, and 三, san, for obvious reasons. But no, the number four is not four strokes. It looks like this. Next, I want to include just one more number, and that is the number 十, pronounced shí. As you can see, it's just a cross, and honestly, a lot of the other numbers in Chinese are also really simple, but I think this one's especially interesting because the idea of like a cross or like an X is so prevalent in so many cultures around the world, and especially interesting when you consider that the Romans, when they created their number system, they chose X for ten, and it's so similar to what the Chinese did. Pretty cool. Our seventh character is quite similar to our last one. It's basically your cross with a stick at the bottom, and this character is pronounced 土. It means dirt, and it already kind of makes sense, but I want to show you something else that's really cool. This character, which is two of the little 人, which is people from, you know, a few slides back, on top of 土, which is dirt. Any guesses what it means? If you know it already, you know that it's the character for sit. Yep, two people on the ground, or two people on dirt is sit. Number eight, 木, wood. This character looks a lot like a cross again with two slanted strokes at the bottom half. It means wood and not necessarily a tree, even though it originally came out of the idea of a tree, and you know, visually looking at it, it looks like a tree, but we have another character to mean tree, but as you can see, this tree character, pronounced 树, does have this 木 character as a radical on the left side, and you'll often see this 木 character as a radical or like a building block component of a lot of characters that involve wood or trees. The next few characters on our list, 9 through 12, I'm just going to kind of breeze through it because they're pretty self-explanatory, and you'll see why. At number 9, we have water. It's pronounced 水. It looks kind of like our wood character, except it's a little bit more flowy. It's got some squiggly lines, so yeah, makes sense. Water. Next, we have 火, fire. This originally just came out of a pictogram of burning flames, and I think you can see that just by looking at it, it kind of looks like flames. Next, at number 11, we have 山, which is mountains. Again, very simple, very easy to see where this came from. Three peaks, it's a mountain. I do want insert a quick little fun word in here. If you combine our last two words, 火, fire, and 山, mountain, you get fire mountain. Any guesses what it means? It's volcanoes. 火山 is volcanoes. At number 12, we have this character, 天. It means sky, and it's really hard to like imagine how you would capture the essence of sky, so I guess this character maybe doesn't make that much sense, but I think after we see our next character, it'll make a little bit more sense to you. Number 13 through 15 on the list are all going to be including a set of two, because they're going to be opposites. So starting with number 13, we're going to learn 大 and 小, meaning big and small. So as you can see, the word for 大 is very broad, and hey, it looks like our last character, 天, so 天 is actually 大 with one more line on top, so you can think of it as a big thing because the sky is very vast, but it's capped because it's as high as we can see. 小 on the other hand, which is small, I guess it looks a little bit more tight and shriveled and not as broad and expansive as 大 looks. I don't know, they're both very simple characters. You can definitely find your own ways of remembering them if what I explain doesn't work for you. Number 14 is up and down. 上 for up and 下 for down. Now the character 上, which is up, looks like our dirt character, except the top line only extends on one side, and 下, which is down, looks almost like a mirror image actually, almost, of 上. If you stack these two characters, one on top of each other, you'll see kind of like the way they're kind of mirroring each other. So it should be pretty easy for you to remember it once you can see that. The last set of opposites we're going to cover is left and right. Left is 左, and right is 右. I don't know if there's any like really good patterns to notice with regards to these two characters. I mean, you could look at the fact that right 右 has our box character in there, which is 口, if you remember that was the very first character we covered, meaning mouth, and in same spot in the left character, which is 左, we have this eye-shaped thing, and that's actually our next character, which is number 16, 功. 功 means work, and the way I would remember this is if you're familiar with like constructions, you know how when they build really tall buildings, they actually have steel beams called eye beams. They're steel beams that are shaped in an eye shape to make them stronger and more rigid so they can withstand larger loads and high winds. Number 17, we have this character. It means strength, pronounced 力. This is probably one of the most commonly tattooed characters that I see people go around with, so if you see somebody with this character on their arm or something, now you know what it means. It means strength. Number 18, 中. This is the character for middle, and it actually has a lot of applications because China in Chinese is 中国, so knowing what 中 means, you can see that 中国 is actually middle kingdom or like the middle country, and 中文, for example, is Chinese language. It means 中, middle, and 文 is literature language, so it's the language of the middle, which refers to the middle kingdom, which is China. Number 19, this is the character for door, pronounced 门. Now this is already really simple and probably pretty easy for you to remember, but actually this is one of those characters where the actual representation of what it means is kind of lost when it got simplified, so let's take a look at the traditional version of this character. Yes, that looks a lot more like what a door used to look like. You might think of a door these days as like a door opening on one hinge like that, but actually back in ancient times in China, they opened in the middle and there were like two hinges on the sides. At number 20, we have this character pronounced 儿. Now it's actually a really simple character with only two strokes, but the meaning is actually a little bit difficult to explain. The first definition is pretty simple. It means son, but the other way that's often used is as a suffix, and this is not a grammar video, so I'm not going to go in depth on how to use this word, but one common usage is in the phrase 嗯嗯在哪, and that means 嗯嗯 is where. Number 21, we have another suffix, and this is pronounced 子 with a neutral tone actually, and again it's really difficult to explain exactly when this is used, but you'll find it in a lot of your vocabulary. For example, 椅子, which is chair, or 桌子, table, or it can even be attached to our last, you know, our last word 儿 for 儿子, meaning son. Number 22 is this character pronounced 了, and this will be the last of these really simple, commonly used, but also really hard to explain characters. It has a lot of similarities with our last character. Visually, it looks almost the same except you don't have that line in the and what does it mean? It indicates a change of state or a completed action. So without going too in-depth with the grammar, I'll just give you an example of how it's used in this phrase. 我做完了, meaning I've completed it. So it wasn't completed before, but now it is complete. It's a change of state or a completed action. Okay, next we have the character 个. This is our general classifier, and visually it looks like our 人 character, which is a person character, with a stick at the bottom. So if you remember it like that, it should be pretty simple. If you don't know what a classifier is, a classifier is basically a structure in Chinese that indicates that a number is talking about quantity and not a sequence. So that's basically the simple rundown on it, but I did make a video on classifiers if you want to more in-depth and check out that video to learn more about classifiers. Number 24, 几. Visually, this character looks like our character 而, except the top is closed off, and there's two primary definitions. The first is several, and the second is how many of something. So in the first instance, if you say like, for example, three beds, instead of saying three, you could insert the character where three would be, and that would mean several beds instead of three beds. Or you can add 几 in front of 个, which is the character we just learned, our general classifier, to mean how many, an arbitrary how many of something. 几个. Number 25, our last character in our set of simple characters that are also commonly used is 有. This character has two primary definitions. It can mean again, or it can mean both. So let's start with again. It's attached actually at the beginning to mean that something's happening again. For example, you can say 你又出去了? You went out again? And the other way to use it is to talk about something that is both this quality and also that quality. For example, you can say 又酸又辣, both sour and hot. So of course you can talk about that when you're talking about sour and hot, sour and spicy, sour and hot soup. 酸辣汤. Alright, now you've reached the part of the video where we talk about some super simple Chinese characters that are not so commonly used. The first one is the character 一. Now what's so special about this character is that it's technically only one stroke, which makes it one of only two Chinese characters with only one stroke, the other being the character for one, of course. And what does it mean? It's the second of the Ten Heavenly Stems. The Ten Heavenly Stems is an old system of counting. It's strictly sequential numbers to sequence things. And the way we use it in modern life is sometimes we'll use it to sequence things. Like in English, for example, we'll often use like A, B, C, D, like item A, item B, item C, D. In Chinese, we'll use the Heavenly Stems. And the first four are honestly the most commonly used. A lot of people don't even know the other ones. 嘉乙丙丁 are the first four. And we use those to rank things. But I also want to teach you something that's a little bit more practical. So let's look at this character, which is basically the 一 character with the man radical on the left side. This is pronounced 一 with a fourth tone, and it means 100 million. So you'll see this for like view counts for videos that you're watching online, for example. The next character is 入, and it means to enter into. Now this character is actually HSK4, so it's not that uncommon either. But it looks exactly like our 人 character for people, except the lines are which stroke is on top is different. So 人 is like this, and 入 is like that. So it's like your person, but instead of just staying still and being themselves, now you're just walking into something. Number 27 is the word 补. And to be honest, I don't even know what this character means. According to the dictionary, it means to divide or forecast or estimate. But the common use of this character is in the word 萝卜, which means any varieties of carrots or radishes. And that's how I know this character. And the other weird thing is that when it's used in that word, it's pronounced 卜, B-O with a neutral accent, and not 卜. Number 29 is this word 厂. And it looks so weird because you probably recognize this component in a lot of other characters, but seeing it stand by itself with nothing else is just really weird. It means factory, and you can actually combine it with another word we learned earlier, 工厂, to mean like a manufacturing factory or a plant. And number 30, our very last character, is the character 川. I mean look at that. Three vertical lines. Now this character technically means rivers, but it also doesn't quite mean rivers. So let me explain. It's often used in poetic depictions of rivers, and in conjunction with 山, which is mountains. And it's this idea of having high mountains and low valleys and a beautiful river flowing through that valley. So that's what 山川 kind of depicts. Now on a more practical front, it's also used in the word 四川, which is a province in China known for their awesome spicy foods. And that is a wrap for 30 super simple Chinese characters that you can begin learning today. Which one of these was your favorite? Did I miss any? Let me know in the comment section down below. Don't forget to give this video a like if you enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing you guys in next week's video. 下次再见了! Bye bye!