Fascinating learning of Chinese Characters

In my day job, the one that pays me, I work alot with China. That’s no big surprise there’s lots of companies that do. They all speak English, which to me is an amazing accomodation and one for which I am grateful. But I wish I understood their writing. Chinese character writing, to me, is beautiful. But what do those characters, those gorgeous intricate symbols mean? Do you know?

Well I quite literally stumbled on a site that teaches these Chinese characters, one symbol a day (or a post anyway). It’s a blog over at Live Journal called Daily Character. You can reach Daily Character by clicking this link HERE. A brief description is in order, from the author’s own words:

I will try to post one new long-form Chinese character here every day, along with some useful information about the character. Membership is open to anyone, although you will probably benefit the most from this group if you have completed at least one year of Mandarin Chinese at the college level. As you read this group, you will no doubt have many questions: why do I priviledge “long-form characters”? what is a “semantic-phonetic compound” anyway? For these and other questions, see the fifth and sixth bullet-points below.

It’s fascinating and well worth a visit. It’s nice to learn something about the language of the people many of us work with everyday.