Learn To Read And Write Chinese Characters

According to the US State Department's ranking of language difficulty, Mandarin is one of the toughest languages in the world for an English speaker to master. (At the top of the Exceptionally Difficult Languages list are Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and Arabic.)

The fact that the Chinese language employs characters rather than an alphabet to portray written words hugely increases its difficulty for speakers of European languages. And the fact that there are more than 50,000 of these characters raises the complexity of the language to a level that causes many people to abandon all attempts to learn Chinese.

Characters, however, are not inscrutable scribble. They are not random, patternless, individual, haphazard mishmashes of lines. They were created, dozens of centuries ago, using an ingenious system of symbols. And they can be understood (not just forceably memorized) by anyone who takes the time to probe their deeper meaning.

The animation above should serve as a gentle introduction to Chinese characters. And the animations on the left might help those new to Chinese to appreciate the subtle beauty, wisdom, history, wit, and striking cleverness buried in each character.