How to Write Chinese Characters: "Seeking The Hermit But No Meeting"

Summary: The Chinese language has produced many poets studied all over the world, including Lau Tzu and Confucious. Thousands of poems from these authors remain, and their aesthetic and cultural value is unparalleled. Chinese is written mostly in logograms, characters that have structural and semantic meaning in the language, as well as pictograms, characters that look like the object that they refer to.

In this free video series, graduate student and teaching assistant Esther-Xiaohua Liu will show you how to write Chinese characters by using the poem “Seeking the hermit but no meeting” by Chinese poet Liu Zongyuan. In these simple demonstrations, Xiaohua shows you how to write and speak in Chinese, starting with individual words like pinetree, under, ask, little kids, say, and teacher. She helps you string the words together as well, recreating the lines of a beautiful poem. This series is a great introduction to writing and speaking Chinese. Time well spent!