Easy Chinese Characters for Beginners
Begin with a few familiar ideas: a person, a mountain, a cup of water. These characters give you concrete meanings to attach to a new shape and sound. You do not need to read Chinese to start.
A small path through the characters
Try three characters at a time. Say each sound aloud, look away, then try to recognize the character again. Open its lesson for an everyday use and a recognition question before marking it completed.
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Start with yourself
Meet person, mouth and hand. Connect each character to something you can point to, then listen to its sound.
Look outside
Move on to mountain, water, tree, sun, moon and fire. Compare the shapes of 日 and 月 carefully; similar outlines do not mean the same thing.
Place things in the world
Continue with up, down, middle, door and heart. Compare 上 with 下, and use each lesson’s example to see how a character appears in a word.
