廟
廟 – Miao4 – Temple
廟 is the answer to yesterday’s riddle! Do you see it? On top is a dot, underneath is a dash, then there’s a slash on the left, two crosses and sun (日) and moon (月).
The clue was the word 醉 – Zui4 – Drunk. This riddle is from the movie 大醉俠 – Da4 Zui4 Xia2 – Big Drunk Hero, aka Come Drink With Me, which is like the Gone with the Wind of Kung Fu movies or something.
Looking up information about that riddle led me to several new amazing Chinese language resources. Here’s a list of the names of the basic strokes (like dot, dash, slash) that Chinese characters are made of, at The Chinese Outpost. I’d never seen this site before, but it is full of information!
Another site I have seen before, but I ran into again is Omniglot. It is a definitive, well researched and well written site about just about all human (and some non-human) writing systems. Here’s their page on Chinese.
Finally, I found the USC Chinese characters page. They have animations of how to write all the most common characters. For instance, here’s 安 – An1 – Peace. And, for each character, they have a link that you can click on to hear how to pronounce it! (click on the word, next to the record player)
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FYI, as we Chinese people often practice the Word \”永\”(which means always or forever) in order to learn about the basic strokes of the Chinese characters during our elementary education, because \”永\” is combined with almosts all of the basic strokes. In another word, if you can write \”永\” good, you must be good at Chinese caligraphy. :)
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Interesting. They don\’t have exactly that character, but I found this one at that USC site, to see how it is written.
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Steve. Did you ever hear about 永字八法(which means \”The eight important elements of character stokes by writting the word 永\”)? That\’s an important concept on Chinese caligraphy. You may check this page written in Japanese introducing 永字八法 and the traditional names of the eight basic strokes.
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Oooooh, no I haven\’t seen that one, but it\’s interesting.