CHINESE LEARN MANDARIN

Chinese calligraphy is an art that is unique to China. This article gives an insight into the history of Chinese calligraphy. Read on to know more.

The literal meaning of calligraphy is beautiful handwriting. In olden days, the books were hand-written using a quill and ink on the materials such as vellum or parchment. A person with beautiful and readable handwriting worked as a scribe. There are mainly three main styles of calligraphy - Arabic, Chinese and Roman. Here we look at Chinese calligraphy.

Chinese Calligraphy

Chinese calligraphy is also known as Oriental calligraphy. The scholars opine that Chinese calligraphy is not only a way to write Chinese characters but also is a unique Chinese art, which was a part of ancient Chinese culture. The Chinese calligraphy style is divided into calligraphy that was developed in ancient China and imperial China.

Calligraphy in Ancient China

In ancient China, incidents were inscribed on the bones of animals or on the shells of tortoises. This form of Chinese calligraphy was popular during the Bronze Age and is popularly known as shell and bone script. It was also known as oracle bone script. The Chinese alphabets of the ancient Chinese language are known as Jiaguwen. Later these characters were replaced by Jin wen, the script written on bronze plates or any bronze ware and Dazhuan, known popularly as the large Seal script or Great Seal script.

Jiaguwen: Jiaguwen is also known as the oracle bone script was a popular form of calligraphy used during the 14th century BC. During this period, pictures were used to convey thoughts and the materials used for writing are ink, brush and bamboo books.

Jinwen: Jin wen is popularly known as Chinese bronze inscriptions. This script was developed during the Shang dynasty and became popular during the Zhou dynasty. During the Shang dynasty, inscriptions were cast on the bronze; while in the Zhou dynasty, inscriptions were engraved on the bronze vessels and pots.

Dazhuan: Dazhuan scripts was used in traditional Chinese writing long before the Qin dynasty. The Qin dynasty used Small Seal script. The scholars avoided using Dazhuan scripts because the scripts were not precise or specific.

Imperial China

Around 220 BC, Qin Shi Huang conquered the entire Chinese basin. He was the first emperor to standardize the Chinese alphabets. Li Si, the prime minister of Qin Huang was a famous calligrapher. He developed a set of characters called Xi ozhun and these characters were standardised by the emperor. The writing tool used was brush and steeles. The calligraphy style that was popularised in imperial China are Lishu style and Kaishu style.

Lishu Style: Lishu style is also known as the clerical script. The modern chinese scripts are more or less similar to the clerical script. This script was developed during the Bronze age. Historians believe, this script was used by the government scribes during the Qin Huang dynasty.

 

Kaishu Style: Kaishu style is popularly known as the traditional script and is still used today. Minor changes have been made in the kaishu style of calligraphy during the 18th century. The scripts of kaishu style are regular and precise; hence was known as the standard script.

Semi-cursive script known as Xingshu and grass script known as Caoshu were the chinese scripts that were developed during the first century AD is also a part of Chinese calligraphy. These scripts were never used to write standard official documents. These scripts are used in modern times to create a visual effect to any personal document.

By Maya Pillai

Chinese Calligraphy & Brush Painting

This Blog created by Chi Zhang, Chinese Calligraphy & Brush Painting artist. Chi is also a teacher in Confucius institute for Scotland in Edinburgh University. 

Incredible chinese calligraphy
A very talented street performer showing off his mad Chinese calligraphy skills using his foot and doing it while standing on his head. Just crazy. Would definitely get my 1RMB.

The scope and variation of Chinese calligraphy
Figures 12 to16, along with some earlier examples, indicate the scope and variation of Chinese calligraphy. The elegant characters of Emperor Hui zong in figure 12 conjure up the image of reeds.

Technorati Tags: chinese calligraphy, chinese calligraphy art, chinese calligraphy lessons

In the modern Chinese writing system, each character is a form of its own, representing a particular sound and at least one meaning.

In other words, each Chinese symbol is a unity of form, sound and meaning.

To learn Chinese writing, you need to know each Chinese symbol or character individually.

You will need a vocabulary of at least 3,000 characters to understand 90% of what you read.

A vocabulary of 4-5,000 characters allows you to understand almost everything written in Chinese in the modern context.

Although there are more than 60,000 characters listed in the largest Chinese dictionaries most of them are ancient symbols and no longer in use.

Only a very small proportion of Chinese characters- some 300, perhaps- are simple representations of natural objects; all others are composite signs.

Each sign generally has two components:

a graphic component (which represent a man, woman, tree etc.)

and a phonetic component, which gives some idea of the pronunciation.

Learning Chinese writing is quite different from learning a Western language.

To learn a Western language like English, you need to know a whole series of sounds.

If you take an English word apart, separating it into its many phonetic syllables, it would lose its meaning altogether.

In learn Chinese writing, you first learn the characters and then you learn the word.

Take, for instance, the Chinese word da4 xue2 which means "university". First you learn da4 ‘big’ and xue2 ’school; learn’ separately.

Although the meaning of da xue has to do with da and xue, it is not a simple case of da ‘big’ plus xue ’school’.

It does not mean "big school".

If you were to take the English word ‘university’ and try to figure out its meaning based on the meanings of the five syllabic components u/ni/ver/sit/ty, you would not understand anything because they mean nothing.

So, the Chinese character forms the basis in learning Chinese writing whereas the word or sentence forms the basis for learning a Western language.

In Chinese writing, the symbol is the unit carrier of meaning whereas in English it is the word which serves the same purpose.

Chinese characters are essentially pictures and they appeal to the eye.

In comparison, Western letters and words are based on sound rather than sight.

by: Kah Joon Liow 

It Is Different Between Chinese Learning And Western Language
In the modern Chinese writing system, each character is a form of its own, representing a particular sound and at least one meaning.

How is learning Chinese writing different from learning a Western
Learning Chinese writing is quite different from learning a Western language. To learn a Western language like English, you need to know a whole series of sounds.

Learning Chinease Writing Is Different From Learning A Western
Learning Chinese writing is quite different from learning a Western language. To learn a Western language like English, you need to know a whole series of sounds.

Technorati Tags: chinese language learning, western english, writing chinese characters

In the Western world, Chinese writing tattoos are popular because it’s considered an exotic and graceful form of self-expression. Chinese characters have an aesthetic appeal associated with the feel of abstract art that gives the wearer a mysterious aura. The written language of China is visual not phonetic. Thus, Chinese writing is creative due to the flow of the lines and the rhythm of the characters.

Here is some information about Chinese characters:

1. In early history, its characters represented the real thing-plants, people, animals, and objects.

2. Later on, the characters were simplified for ease in writing them. The characters became more symbolic than pictorial and Chinese writing tattoos began to get very popular.

3. The characters (or ideograms) were adapted to represent abstractions. For example, a fire character represented anger or passion; a snake represented poison; a ship represented travel.

4. The ideograms can be combined to make other words. For example, the character for mountain is combined with the character for sheep to make ‘mountain-sheep’, which is the Chinese name for a goat.

5. In recent years, the government of China adopted Paihua, which is a simplified way of writing Chinese characters.

6. Remember in China, one symbol can stand for more than one thing. For example, the symbol of family can also mean brother, sister, child, parent, and is also considered to be a symbol of honor. In Chinese writing tattoos, one symbol can offer several different meanings making them very popular tattoo designs.

7. For an English word, the Chinese translation will often have two or more Chinese characters. They are read from left to right. If you prefer to display the tattoo vertically, the one on the left should go on the top.

As you can see Chinese writing is really complex. It’s important to find a tattoo artist that is familiar with forms of Chinese characters and is experienced with tattooing Chinese writing tattoos. It’s ideal to get a translation of the Chinese character you want tattooed from a reliable source.

Here are some popular Chinese writing tattoos:

Love. The character love is a treasured symbol of the Chinese language.

Strength. This character in a form of a tattoo is considered to bring great fortune for the wearer, in the form of health and well-being.

Zodiac. There is only one character for the word zodiac. This symbol is considered to be very lucky.

Dragon. The character of dragon will bring luck to the person wearing the tattoo, in the form of health, love, wealth and success.

Other lucky symbols: Fu (blessing, good fortune), Xi (happiness), Ai (love, affection), and Shou (longevity, life, birthday).

Author: David Schwinler

Chinese Tattoo - Peace - Tattoo Designs Gallery
hanwords.com has added a photo to the pool: HanWords.com gives you access to unlimited Chinese symbol designs that are applicable to tattoo design, graphic design, horticulture, etc. 

Chinese Characters Tattoos
Chinese characters tattoos carry a lot of appeal to people in the United States and throughout Western culture. Chinese characters tattoos are beautiful.

Chinese Dragon Tatt fef oo
The Chinese dragon tattoo has become a very popular form of tattoo around the world.

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Did you know there are only 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

Yes, 6 kinds of Chinese characters make up the 50,000 Chinese characters in existence today.

Amazing isn’t it?

It shows that there is a logical symbol system used to create Chinese characters.

That they are not just random lin es and strokes.

Once you know these 6 types of Chinese characters, you’l find that learning Chinese writing isn’t so difficult after all.

Oh, one more thing…

The ‘radicals’

No, these have nothing to do with extremists or terrorists.:)

They are the "root elements" of Chinese characters.

The meaning part of Chinese characters.

There are 214 of them.

They exist independently or are part of complex characters.

Once you get a general idea of the common radicals, you can guess the meaning of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese dictionaries are organized by radicals - starting with one-stroke radicals, two, three and so on, and hanyu pinyin, the modern Chinese Romanization system.

So you see, by knowing the radicals and the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters, one can pretty much guess the meaning and sound of Chinese characters.

Not all, but many of them.

So, what are the 6 ways of forming Chinese characters?

The earliest Chinese characters some 4,000 years ago were shaped like the things they represented.

These are called pictographs.(1)

They were pictures of humans, animals and natural objects.

The 300 plus pictographs form the building blocks of Chinese writing.

Later to create more words, symbols were added to pictographs to form ideographs.(2)

And two or more pictographs were combined to form composite ideographs.(3)

As you can imagine, this symbol system could not produce a lot of Chinese characters easily.

So borrowed characters came into being.(4)

A character was borrowed because it had the same sound, disregarding the meaning.

So ‘new’ characters with the same sound but different meanings were formed.

But what happened to the original characters?

In order to retain their original meanings, a meaning component was added to the sound component.

These gave rise to phonetic compounds.(5)

These are Chinese characters with a sound part and a meaning part.

Today, this type of Chinese characters make up 80% of Chinese characters in use.

The last type of Chinese characters are called Transferred characters.(6)

Transferred characters share the same radical and have the same meaning but their pronunciations are different.

So early Chinese characters were created based on meaning alone and started from pictures.

Eventually, each Chinese character became ‘a unit of sound and meaning’ like what we have today.

But it remains possible to guess the meaning of Chinese characters from the meaning component, the radicals.

To read a lively description of the 6 ways of forming Chinese charcters complete with Chinese character examples, go to http://www.living-chinese-symbols.com.

Author: Kah Joon Liow

6 Ways of Forming Chinese Characters

Did you know there are only 6 ways of forming Chinese characters? Yes, 6 kinds of Chinese characters make up the 50000 Chinese characters in existence today. 

The earliest Chinese characters

It was said that the Chinese characters were invented by a Master Chronicler of History for the Yellow Emperor, in the forms of figures of birds, animals, and objects.

Learn Chinese Characters — Pen

Bamboo combined with hair ( ) also makes “pen”: . Although both the traditional character and simplified character can be used to write “pen”.

Technorati Tags: chinese characters, chinese writing, learn chinese characters

Chinese is one of the most beautiful and complex writing systems in the world and it’s also the oldest form of writing that has kept so close to the original. Chinese writing dates back 3,000 years. The first Chinese writing ever discovered dates back to the Shang Dynasty (1500-950 BC) and was found on a fragment of a bone.

Chinese writing originated from pictures (hieroglyphs) that people drew of the sun, the moon, plants, animals, and anything else they saw that connected them to the world. Modern Chinese characters bare little relation to the pictures they came from, and many characters are combinations of two or more symbols. Although Chinese characters have undergone many changes over the years, the symbols still provide keys for learning how to read Chinese.

Spoken Chinese includes seven to ten different groups, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shanghainese. There are also many local dialects and accents particular to different areas of China. A person born in Northern China who speaks Mandarin, and someone born in Southern China who speaks Cantonese, will both write the same way.

There are over 59,000 characters in the Chinese dictionary, but only 5,000 of these are regularly used. In order to read a newspaper, you must be able to read 3,000 characters.

The known history of writing in China began with the oracle bones, writing on either turtle shells or bones. These bones were used as a means of telling the future, healers would heat the bone and then tell someone’s fate based on which way the bone cracked.

The next known form of writing came from vessels in bronze that were inscribed with writing. These examples come from the Shang and the Zhou Dynasty (1150-771 BC). Around the 5th century BC people began writing on pieces of bamboo, wood, and silk cloth.

The invention of paper greatly changed the form of Chinese writing. Paper was invented in AD 105 by Ts’ai Lun, although archeologists say it was about 300 years earlier. Early paper was made from hemp, bamboo, and other fibers until the invention spread throughout the world in the 10th century.

Chinese writing has undergone many different changes in style. But the greatest change has come about in this century, with the invention of simplified characters. Most Chinese learned writing by using the traditional characters, until the formation of the People’s Republic of China led to a change in the Chinese way of writing. The simplified characters were designed to aid literacy in China. But Hong Kong and Taiwan still use the traditional characters, and most educated Chinese people can read traditional characters as well as simplified characters.

Chinese writing has undergone much criticism for its difficulty, and there have been alphabetized forms of Chinese writing such as the Wade-Gilles system and Pinyin. Although there have been some who advocate doing away with Chinese characters and using Pinyin instead, Chinese writing is still around. And I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you would like to learn more about Chinese writing, or have your name or anything else translated into Chinese, please click here.

By: Sylvia Smelcer

CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY MADE EASY
There are other Chinese calligraphy books out there but none approach the subject in this way. Rebecca Yue’s unique approach is distilled from years of teaching this ancient art. 

Learn Chinese Characters Writing
There are few good teachers of traditional Chinese calligraphy outside China. My suggestion is to practice Chinese characters with a fountain pen. This has many advantages. 

Chinese calligraphy
Calligraphy is art to form writing signs from a language. It is characterised by wealth and the originality of the Chinese writing. So, it permits an enormous panel of expression.

Technorati Tags: chinese writing, learn chinese characters, writing chinese characters

When I tell people that I speak and write fluent Chinese, they usually respond, "That’s impossible. Isn’t Chinese the hardest language in the world?" I tell them that one thing makes Mandarin Chinese easy to learn: there are so many people to practice with!

China has probably already surpassed the US in Internet usage. One estimation says that around 200 million people in China are on the ‘net (that’s more surfers than the US, but still only 1/6 of the Chinese population). Many of these Chinese Internet surfers are curious about the outside world, and eager to make friends with foreigners. All you need is a place to meet online.

Once you find Chinese friends, learning the language is a breeze. Since English is a required class through High School in China, the first barrier to communication is gone. If you are willing to help each other out, perhaps agreeing to split your chatting time half-and-half English and Chinese, you’ll both be improving your language skills.

Chinese writing is one of the hardest barriers to crack when learning the Chinese language. However, don’t worry about learning brush strokes and calligraphythis is the Internet age. Most people use Pinyin, which is essentially the English alphabet, to input Chinese characters on their computer on a normal keyboard. It’s just a matter of remembering how to spell the words, and Pinyin is much simpler than English spelling! For example, type "ni hao" and the two Chinese characters meaning "Hello!" will show up. Most computers already have this input method installed as an option.

Recognizing characters is even easier, especially when you see them used in conversation. There are hundreds of dictionary websites where you can copy and paste Chinese characters, and see the meaning and pronunciation. Chinese characters are designed to be memorable, with different parts to indicate both meaning and pronunciation. It’s not as hard as it looks! And if you have any questions on the meaning of a character, ask someone online. Finally, if you don’t feel like learning any characters, just chat in Pinyin (writing Chinese with the English alphabet) and you can concentrate on conversation skills, vocabulary, and cultural exchange.

Author: Craig Batts

How to Learn Chinese Online: Learn Mandarin the Cheap and Easy Way

Online Chinese lessons are the best option for busy people to learn on their own schedule and at their own pace. … There are a large number of companies that provide free tutors.

CTSS - Chat Translator and Speaker for Skype - Skype Developer
Maybe you can even all get together all at the same time by creating a Skype chat based in another language and practice learning new languages in a Skype Group chat?

A beginner tutorial on learning Chinese
One of the most innovative ways to learn Chinese is by joining a chat room or virtual reality environment. The design of software programs have allowed the use of multi-lingual input.

Technorati Tags: learn chinese online, mandarin translation, online chinese

Many people would love to be able to learn an addition language. There are many benefits to learning a second, third or even fourth language. It is common knowledge that prospects that are capable of speaking more than one language make more money than those only capable of speaking one language.

It is also important to be able to speak the basics of a language whenever you travel to another country for a business or personal trip. English, French, Spanish and Chinese are often the most sought after languages that people wish to learn. If you wish to learn Chinese then you will need to be able to decipher each Chinese character.

In order to be able to learn to read Chinese writing you will need to be able to understand Chinese characters. There are many different methods that can be used to learn Chinese characters. It is possible to learn how to read Chinese writing one your own using videos, books, and flashcards. You can also enroll in a university or school that offers Chinese classes. You can also enroll in an online school and learn to read Chinese writing over the internet. There are plenty of online schools that offer Chinese courses.

There are many advantages to learn how to read Chinese writing and Chinese character over the internet as opposed to enrolling in a school or university. MANDO MANDARIN is an online school that provides students with live lessons with certified private Chinese tutors residing in China. These lessons will teach you how to write Chinese character in your own home, office, or school.

Enrolling in an online school means that you will not have to commute back and forth. This means that you’ll save a lot of gas money as well as reduce the amount of wear and tear you put on your vehicle.

MANDO MANDARIN uses a unique method that incorporates unique teaching materials and distinguished textbooks to ensure that you learn to read Chinese writing with the least effort in the shortest amount of time possible.

The online school uses a fun yet effective method to make sure that you will learn Chinese character within a short period of time. The good thing about the method used by the MANDO MANDARIN is that it doesn’t require the student to do any self studying or any homework whatever so ever.

People who wish to learn to read Chinese writing will be happy to learn that the school offers a unique system to teach you how to do it. The school will teach you how to read the one hundred and eight most commonly used Chinese radicals. You will also learn each radical’s name, origin, and meaning. By learning each of the one hundred and eight radicals you will be able to recognize each Chinese character much easier. You will also learn how to write these Chinese characters. In just about four hours of schooling you will be able to learn the eight basic character strokes and structures.

By: Vikram kuamr

Character Development
"You can’t learn to read Chinese without memorizing the characters, and you can’t memorize the characters without writing them many many times."

Is Chinese Character difficult to learn?
"Writing Chinese is becoming easier with modern technology (but that may further erode the basic ability to write it or read it), but it still requires an enormous input of time to learn."

6 Ways of Forming Chinese Characters
"Once you know these 6 types of Chinese characters, you’ll find that learning Chinese writing isn’t so difficult after all."

Technorati Tags: easy way to learn chinese, learn to speak mandarin, learning mandarin chinese, mandarin language course.