Pres 1

Transcript

1. Well done! You just learned 10 of the most common Chinese characters.
2. If you are a bit of a pessimist though, you might be wondering...
3. “how many more characters will I have to learn before I can read something really useful?”
4. Like this Chinese MENU, for instance.
5. 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.
6. And the answer to you question is, “not actually that many.”
7. You have already learned about a tenth of the characters you need. You should be reading the whole thing by the end of the week...
8. ...or perhaps even sooner! So let’s get started!
9. Today’s Chinese characters have ancient origins: originally they were pictures of the objects or ideas they represented.
10. 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.
11. But with a bit of imagination you can often nd your way back to the original pictures and meanings
12. In the rst 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!
13. Some of the pictures are a perfect t... some are a bit more elaborate. But that just makes them more interesting, and so more memorable!
14. So see if you can make sense of these next ones!