Transcription
Hi, I'm Leo. Today we are going to talk about how Chinese people learn Chinese characters. I know if you grew up with ABCs, you would probably cry when you learn Chinese characters. I know it's scary. So, it's only fair to wonder, do Chinese kids cry, too, when they learn characters? I'll tell the answer first. Yes. Oh, yes. We cried. We struggled. We bargained with our parents. We threatened to become farmers, but we still learn them. Thousands of them. I've never seen any adult who can't read or write characters.
In this video, I'm going to explain how many characters are expected to learn, how they associate the meanings and pronunciations, how to remember stroke orders, and your favorite part, the classic harsh Chinese way of education. Well, first let me explain how many characters kids are expected to learn. In China, the character learning journey starts early and it goes step by step. Around six year old or even earlier, depending on how pushy Chinese parents you have, Chinese kids learn how to hold a pencil correctly so they can start writing. By the end of grade 1, which is six to seven years old, kids are supposed to recognize about four to 500 characters and be able to write 100 super simple characters like these. Simple, right? Only a few strokes. One stroke for e number one. Two strokes for person people. Three strokes for big. No big deal. But then comes the slightly less simple ones. I or me, seven strokes. Home, 10 strokes. I love 10 strokes plus emotional damage if you write it wrong. It levels up like an RPG game. You get harder challenges once you complete simple ones. By the end of primary school, which is around age 12, kids are expected to know 2500 to 3,000 characters. And yeah, they're tested on it.
You might ask, Leo, that's a lot. How are they supposed to remember all the pronunciations and meanings of the characters? Is there any way to make it easier? Yeah, there is. And the secret weapon is called pinging. You might have heard of it. Ping is the romanized system for pronouncing Chinese. It uses the Latin alphabet. So becomes. Some people might think that pinging is just for foreigners, but it's actually a great tool for kids, too. Chinese kids learn pinging when they start writing characters. It's like toddler's training wheels, but for reading. Let's take some children's books as an example. They usually mark peeing above each character. This way they can pronounce the words and slowly associate them with their characters. Eventually, as they grow more confident, the pinging is faced out. Characters take over. Let me show you my nephew's textbook. This is what they learn in grade one. You can see lots of peeing there to help them read. This is a grade three textbook. Still some peeing there, but most of the characters don't have them on the top. This is a grade six textbook. The characters are so much more complicated and with even fewer peeing above them. It's like when you first learned to walk. You needed a bit of support at the beginning, but before long you were walking and even running on your own.
Okay, that's for reading. Now it comes to the question, how about writing? To learn to write characters well, there's one thing I believe every Chinese kid has done. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Welcome to the legendary Chinese character practice book. A grid lined notebook where each square bes to be filled with the same character 20 times. Parents often have to supervise their kids. I still remember how my mom commented on my handwriting like this character looks like it was written by a chicken's food or one more page then you can play. Now thinking back about it, it's painful but helpful. The more you write, the more your brain remembers the structure, the meaning and stroke order.
Speaking of stroke order, you might hate this a lot. Yes, there is a right way to draw that box. So to write this character way return, you don't just scribble a box within a box. There's a precise design of order like this. Top to bottom, left to right, horizontal before vertical, inside before enclosing. Teachers will absolutely scold you if you freestyle it. Why? Because it affects legibility, it messes up your writing rhythm, and it drives calligraphy teachers insane. So, to make memorization less painful, teachers and smart parents use some fun little stories that explain why a character looks the way it does. For example, the character sh means rest. It's made of person and mu tree. So the story is a person is leaning against a tree that's taking a rest. This character means fairy. It's made of person and shan mountain. So the story is a person living in a mountain is probably somebody immortal like a fairy. This storytelling method works really well for younger kids. I remember there's flashcards with silly cartoons and rhymes, whatever works.
Okay, finally your favorite part. The classic way of Chinese education tests, which is basically just lots of dictation is listen is right. Chinese students regularly do dictation quizzes where the teacher reads a word or sentence aloud and students must write the characters correctly. If you make a mistake, you'll have to copy the characters for 20 times again, maybe more. That is a nightmare. But things are slightly changing now. We know it's digital age. So nowadays, kids type a lot like on phones, tablets, and computers. They use ping in input like this. Type choose nice and simple. You don't need to write them stroke by stroke anymore. But this raises a new issue. People can read characters but can't always write them by hand. So some schools still require handwritten homework to keep the writing muscles alive. The balance between technology and tradition is still being figured out.
Okay, now let's come to a conclusion. Learning Chinese characters is hard. It's slow, sometimes painful, but incredibly rewarding. Chinese kids don't have some magical brain power, but everybody grows up with it and gets used to it. Again, I've never seen any adult who can't read or write characters. None. [clears throat] And don't worry, you can do it, too. Of course, you are not alone. Think of how many people there are in China. 1.4 billion. If that many people can learn it, it can't be that hard. Thanks for watching. If you find this video helpful, don't forget to like and subscribe. I'm Leo. See you next time. Bye for now.