nciku.com - Chinese Character Animations

#chinese #mandarin
It would be great to be able to add character animations here now and then, so I am now testing those available at nciku.com (the best Chinese/Mandarin dictionary).

Well... It didn't work. I am pretty sure these animations are not Made At nciku, so I will hopefully find an alternative source. ...

Update 09-02-02

I have still not managed to find those animations I think I've seen somewhere, but on the other hand I found a way to show the animations here, if the people at nciku.com think it is OK.

nciku.com: How to use 必

end of update

In the meantime a GIF animation from this page. Not a bad alternative, really.
Testing something more advanced from eStroke

Too "advanced", too big, too many Google ads....

The reason for picking this particular character is that I tend to forget the stroke order all the time. If you want to get 5 new characters to practice every day, follow the nciku blog. Here is a permanent link to the very first five characters.

Learn Chinese Characters (Components III)

This is the third and final post continued from

Component Learning and Analysis II

To get the full background you might/should also study

Kanji Lesson 1 for JapanesePod101 Students

Don't mind the "Kanji" word there. "Kanji" (Japanese) and "Hanzi" (Chinese) is identical for the purpose here: How to learn and remember Chinese Characters.

In the first parts we only looked at the seemingly complex cā character. Now the really easy two other characters. yǎn is short for eye, and according to the etymologists the character contains two components meaning eye.

The black component above is the standard character for eye. And below is a mirror image of an eye, still according to the experts.I agree that it is hard to "see" this, but we'll have to accept it for the time being. This component is very common so it's a very good idea to assign a keyword/label here. Since there is a very similar character ....... meaning "Good" with just one tiny "drop" making the difference. Let's assume it's so GOOD that a little tear trickles (upwards :-) ), then we could call the mirror eye "Dry Eye"? It's really up to you to assign labels/mnemonics to each component according to your own imagination and preferences.

Finally we have a REAL mirror/lens:
This is the simplified character for the full Kanji, traditional Hanziuses the full version of Metal/Gold as the left component in Mirror/Lens
So what's left is the rather peculiar component to the right:
This is make up by adding Person/Human legs to a Sound! Yes, it's a funny world, this.Finally, if we pull "sound" apart
we have the (gray) component derived from the character for To Stand etc. Below (black) might be seen as SUN, but it isn't. It is a mouth with tongue (in cheek). CompareThey are indeed easy to mix up when you don't see them side by side, but you can usually spot the longer shape of the sun.

Now time for do-it-yourself and practices. Copy the character below into nciku.com, search and scroll down the page to see the stroke order animations. Write, write and write! Good luck!

眼 目 艮 良 镜 金 音 立 日 曰

New Practical Chinese Reader, Second book

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Just testing some stuff here. The full post will come later. Or even later.

Click on the image below to get it in full size.

"Teach yourself Chinese" by Elisabeth Scurfield

This has been sitting here far too long! I will thus make it very brief: this is an excellent book, strongly recommended if you also buy the CD:s. As the reviews on Amazon.com suggests, it is a very fast-paced book at first. Don't mind the "I found the tapes to be useless." comment, though, since I can't possibly imagine what this means. The CD recordings are extremely well done, with a mix of various speaker to make the dialogues very useful! Check for yourself below.

Don't forget to Look Inside! There you will find the first lessons. - You will have to spend more time on the first lessons than you might be used to, but it sure pays off in case you are patient. The first 10 lessons are in pinyin only, but with the Hanzi versions published in the back of the book. I found it a bit troublesome to flip back and forth so I wrote the texts on my computer and printed them out.

Download files from the Google Group

Let me know if you have any problems with downloads, etc.

In short: This book is great even if you have a text book you are satisfied with, at least if you are a bit like me: Variation is FUN!



No proof, but a personal experience: I haven't repeated this very much, but I can nevertheless still remember most of what is said after a couple of weeks away from it.