Creative Chinese Learning
Journey Through the Origins: Exploring the Art of Chinese Characters
Easy to Learn
Images are used to represent Chinese characters helping people to remember the form and meaning more easily.
Easy to Develop
Once you remember the basic components (radicals), you can combine them with different elements to make thousands of characters.
Easy to Sign Up
Sign up for free. You can access Topic 1 free of charge. Let’s begin your wonderful learning journey.
Welcome to Pichinese!
There are more than seven thousand languages in the world, making communication difficult. However, everyone can use pictures to express their thoughts and ideas. Visual cues help us to better retrieve and remember information.
In Pichinese, all the characters are represented by meaningful and distinctive images, which were inspired by the creation of the Chinese language dating back to 12th century BCE when Chinese characters were displayed as drawings called oracle bone inscriptions. You can learn Chinese from scratch by using Pichinese.
The course gives learners a fundamental knowledge of the most common characters in use, basic grammar, different strokes, stroke order and reading direction. For each character, you will learn about its simplified form*, traditional form* (if there is one), formation, radical*, pinyin* (pronunciation) and meaning. All will become clear in the course!
Watch the video on the right for an introduction.
For example: the oracle bone inscription for 'man' is a drawing of a person.
Oracle Bone Inscription
Pichinese Graphic
Modern Character
Our aim is to use a distinctive drawing to represent each character, which allows you to remember not only the structure of the script, but also the original root and meaning of the character.
Radicals
All Chinese characters are formed from the combination of one or more components, rather like building-blocks. There are around two hundred basic components, which are called “radicals”. The compounds of different components make thousands of characters. Knowing the radicals not only helps you to memorise the characters, it also makes it easier for you to associate their meaning and sometimes pronunciation.
We have created Pichinese images for each “radical”. We would recommend you to go to the “radical” page on our website and familiarise yourself with these “radical” images as you would find them in all the other characters. So, by memorising them, you will have remembered a part of all the characters as every single character has a radical.
Traditional and Simplified Forms
There are two forms of Chinese writing, the “traditional” form and the “simplified” form.
We are going to focus on the simplified forms in Pichinese.
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We hope you will enjoy the learning journey with Pichinese!