About two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher Lao Zi remarked: “Dao gives rise to one; one gives rise to two; two gives rise to three , and three gives rise to myriad things.” In other words, the entirety of the universe is composed of just a few simple elements.

Chinese characters are this way as well. In the beginning, there were only a few simple characters; in turn, these were used as the building blocks for characters of greater complexity. In this way, the number of Chinese characters increased exponentially.

This is the character for person: “人”. The combination of two “人” characters gives rise to “从”. It looks like one person following another. The original meaning of this character was “to follow”. There “人” together gives rise to the character “众”.

In ancient China, the number “three (or multiples of three)” was used to express the concept of “many”. As a result the character “众” means “many people”. In combing the character “人” with other simple characters. We can get a lot of other characters, such as “人” and “木” form the character “休”, depicting a person lying against a tree. The meaning of this character is “to rest”.

Chinese characters are not hard to learn, because there are some rules to follow as stated above. Keats School has been doing various research on how to help students learn Chinese as soon as possible. Most of the courses at Keats School are one-on-one, so you can tell your teacher whatever you want to learn, including the Chinese characters. study in China or spend a Summer in China, learn Chinese at Keats School.