Learn Chinese for beginners | Lesson 10: 17 Chinese characters and the word money in Chinese
In today’s video, you will learn 17 Chinese words with their Chinese characters. You will train yourself so well that you recognize them instantly, you will be able to pronounce these Chinese characters, know what they mean and you will know how to type them into your computer, if - you’ve learned the lessons 1 - 9.
Learn Chinese for beginners | Lesson 10: 17 Chinese characters and the word money in Chinese
As usual, you will learn the Chinese vocabulary from lesson 3-4 again, but instead of pinyin, you will learn the Chinese characters this time. Since there are altogether 35 Chinese words you learned there, I broke them down into two parts. Today you will learn the first 17 Chinese words with the Chinese characters.
You will start with a quiz to test if you are ready for today's lesson. This will test your pinyin skill and also your Chinese vocabulary from lessons 3-4.
Then I talked about a Chinese word that is very typical for building Chinese characters and how a Chinese character can work. This word is 金钱
The character 金 means gold, and 钱 means money. And 金钱 means money in an abstract term, the money mentioned here is not about concret money. A more pragmatic approach would be: Whenever you are not sure: use 钱 instead of 金钱, 钱 is far more often used than 金钱。
But this is not the only reason I want to talk about it. I picked the word 金钱, also to help you see another way how Chinese characters are built. This is not going to be enough for you to instantly know what the words are, but it can help you guess the context better.
金 means gold, and for a long time, gold was money as well. But 金 also meant metal in old Chinese. And this comes together to build the word 钱.
钱 consists of two parts: left and right. The left part of 钱 originates from 金, because money used to be gold and metal. And it’s not just that. Whenever you see the left part ⻐you can guess this is something that consists of or has something to do with metal.
Such as
针 needle
钉 nail
钓钩 fishing hook
This way of building characters is called Compound ideographs , one of the 6 ways how a Chinese character can be built.
Remember the character 口 from last lesson? There I talked about how the character 吗 was built?
There I showed you the picture of a mouth. This is the first method how a Chinese character is built: Pictogram
This is also what many, many Chinese teachers use to demonstrate how Chinese characters are easier to learn than you think. But this is dangerous because students tend to think they could always find a picture to explain what a character means.
Pictograms are only one of the six methods how the characters are built. These 6 methods are called 六书: six write. 书 means book in modern chinese, but in old chinese, it means also to write. The 六书 system was summarized almost 2000 years ago. And if you learn the rest 5, building characters becomes truly a science itself. That’s also why I’m not getting any deeper any more. I just want you to understand, Chinese characters are not just about little pictures.
And today, I showed you another method next to pictogram: Compound ideograph. This can give you far more context. Knowing the fact that this part ⻐ has something to do with metal is quite pragmatic, whenever you see new characters and you want to guess what it can mean.
After this part got clarified, you will learn 17 words with their Chinese characters. They are part of your Chinese vocabulary you are already good at, but this time, instead of knowing them in pinyin, you will know them also in Chinese characters. You will learn, practice and then translate these Chinese words until you truely can understand what they mean.
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