Simply Chinese: Recipes from a Chinese Home Kitchen

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Break it down into steps and have a piece of paper and a pen ready – actually, many pieces of paper. Start with the Basics Written Chinese language contains more than 50,000 characters, and more and more are added all the time. For Suzie Lee, food and Chinese home cooking has always been personal - in Chinese culture, food and family are intertwined. Suzie strives to capture and recreate those cooking traditions she shared with her late mother, her inspiration. She wowed the judges of BBC's Best Home Cook and now Suzie Lee, with the launch of her debut cookbook, is determined to show us all that Chinese cooking is easier than we think. She chats seafood noodles, spam sandwiches and accountancy with Jenny Lee...

However, Suzie Lee, the 2020 winner of the BBC's Best Home Cook and presenter of her own TV show, Suzie Lee's Home Cook Heroes, says that Chinese cooking is so much more. The Chinese language is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. It forms part of a language family called the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbolsinstead of Chinese characters. cǎo shū) — Grass Script. This is cursive-ness to the extreme. There are more combined strokes than in Running Script, and some strokes are completely left out. The Chinese language is like a big tree. The base of the tree started thousands of years ago. It now has several main limbs. Some people call "just a branch" what other people call a main limb, so you can say there are six or seven main limbs. Each of these main limbs splits off into branches about the way there are branches of English spoken in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, India, and so forth. Just as the Romance languages all come from the area around Rome and are based on Latin, the Chinese languages all have some common source, so they keep many common things among them.You won’t master the language if you don’t know its basics. To start you off with Chinese characters, learn the easiest ones first. Author Liu Shahe was an outspoken critic of the simplification of Chinese characters. He wrote a dedicated column entitled "Simplified Characters are Unreasonable" (简化字不讲理) in the Chinese edition of the Financial Times. [27] Learning Chinese becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. Chinese characters are often referred to as “Chinese symbols”, and you’ll find out that a lot of times they actually symbolize the word they mean.

In 1956, the government of the People's Republic of China made public a set of simplified Chinese characters to make learning, reading and writing the Chinese language easier. In Mainland China and Singapore, people use these simpler characters. In Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places where they speak Chinese, people still use the more traditional characters. The Korean language also uses Chinese characters to represent certain words. The Japanese language uses them even more often. These characters are known in Korean as Hanja and in Japanese as Kanji.Winning Best Home Cook opened many doors, but I always describe myself as a chartered accountant who cooks. Cooking is my relief. I haven't lost the fun of it yet and hope to continue both," adds the 38-year-old. These characters were simplified as left-side radicals but maintained the traditional form when used as other character components or standalone characters. Another example of a simplification that doesn’t seem to fit the rules is 夸 / 誇 (kuā) — exaggerate. Pinyin will help you a lot when learning Chinese because it means you can start reading without learning Chinese characters. The 6 Types of Chinese Characters

There are ongoing disputes among users of Chinese characters related to the introduction of simplified Chinese characters. Methodology [ edit ] Structural simplification of characters All characters simplified this way are enumerated in Charts 1 and 2 of the 1986 Complete List of Simplified Characters [ zh] (hereafter the Complete List). Chart 1 lists all 350 characters that are used by themselves, and can never serve as 'simplified character components'. Chart 2 lists 132 characters that are used by themselves as well as utilized as simplified character components to further derive other simplified characters. Chart 2 also lists 14 'components' or 'radicals' that cannot be used by themselves, but can be generalized for derivation of more complex characters. Derivation based on simplified character components Chart 3 lists 1,753 characters which are simplified based on the same simplification principles used for character components and radicals in Chart 2. This list is non-exhaustive, so if a character is not already found in Charts 1–3, but can be simplified in accordance with Chart 2, the character should be simplified. Elimination of variants of the same character Series One Organization List of Variant Characters [ zh] accounts for some of the orthography differences in mainland China versus in Hong Kong and Taiwan. These are not simplifications of character structures, but rather reduction in number of total standard characters. For each set of variant characters that share the identical pronunciation and meaning, one character (usually the simplest in form) is elevated to the standard character set, and the rest are obsoleted. After rounds of revisions, by 1993, some 1,027 variant characters have been declared obsolete by this list. Amongst the chosen variants, those that appear in the 1986 Complete List are also simplified in character structure accordingly. Adoption of new standardized character forms New standardized character forms originated from the 1965 Characters for Publishing list containing 6,196 characters. These tend to be vulgar variant forms for most of its characters. The 1988 List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (hereafter Common Modern Characters) contains 7,000 characters, and replaces the 1965 list. Since the new forms take vulgar variants, many characters now appear slightly simpler compared to old forms, and as such are often mistaken as being structurally simplified. Structural simplification of characters [ edit ]Before 1956, Chinese was written using only Traditional Characters. At that time, most Chinese people could not read or write at all. The government of the People's Republic of China thought that the Traditional characters were very hard to understand. They also thought that if they made the characters simpler, more people could learn how to read and write. Today, many people in China can read and write with the new Simplified Characters. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GFDL; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details. First things first: You probably already know this, but if you want to learn Mandarin Chinese, you need to learn the Chinese characters. There’s no way around this. Co, Emily (December 23, 2008). "School Bridges China-Japan Gap". The Japan Times. Archived from the original on 2008-12-26 . Retrieved 2008-12-23.