Menu reader pres1

setting the scene

Transcript

1. First, let me just show you something a bit bewildering:
3. That is the menu on the wall of a little restaurant near where I used to live on Dongsi Sitiao, in Beijing. The food is indescribably delicious.
4. The menu, as well as being utterly bewildering to someone who can’t read Chinese, also happens to contain most of the key foods that you will find on all Chinese menus. Soon, and I mean really incredibly soon you will be able to read it.
5. This which will be useful if, a) if you go to China and want to eat in any of the millions of glorious little local restaurants which don’t have English menus, or b) if you want to show off to your friend in a Chinese restaurant nearer home.
6. Either way, Lets get started!
7. Today’s Chinese characters have ancient origins: originally they were pictures of the objects or ideas they represented
8. Many characters have changed their shape and their meaning over the last 2000 years. So sometimes the characters now look pretty different to what they represent.
9. But with a bit of imagination you can often find your way back to the original pictures and meanings
10. In the first level, you learned a few of the most commonly used characters using some pretty neat animations. Now you are going to learn a few more!
11. Some the pictures are a perfect fit... some are a bit more elaborate. But that just makes them more interesting, and so more memorable!
12. So see if you can make sense of these next ones!