This week I learned my first 32 Chinese characters. I can even write them (slowly)! I got a neat book at Lucky Bookstore across from campus called Chinese Characters for Beginners. It shows diagrams of the basic characters and how they have evolved. For example, take the character mei, for the word “beautiful,” as shown above. It started out as a pictograph of a guy wearing a headdress and evolved into today’s more abstract version. The origins of the characters are fascinating. In class, we learned that the word for “ancient ” or “old” is a combination of the character for “mouth” and the number ten, describing something that has passed through ten mouths, or ten generations.
Before I got the book I was making up increasingly elaborate mnemonics in order to memorize each character. One of them, wan, as in “Taiwan,” requires 25 strokes. Yikes. Each character has a story, but you’ve got to know them to be able to retain it all.
Emily Haile 