characters. But before we dive in, I want to make sure you meet our course prerequisites

first. We strongly believe that spoken chinese and written chinese should be taught separately.

And it's more efficient if you learn how to speak first. And then how to read and type.

Based on this philosophy, this character course is designed for learners, who either have

already completed our yoyo beginner conversational chinese course or at least have the basis

of spoken chinses down. The focus of this course is to teach you the characters for

things you already know how to say. In other words, you should get the how to say part

done before you take this course. I hope that's clear. Alright, now let's talk a little bit

about the characters we teach. You might know that there are two categories of chinese

characters. Simplified, jiǎn tǐ zì and traditional fán tǐ zì. Originally all characters

were the same, but at one point the government of mainland china wanted to raise the literacy

rate in china, and they came up with ways to make some of the more complicated characters

a little simpler and easier to learn. For example, this is character for horse, mǎ

in simplified characters, and this is how it looks in tradition characters. This is

the character for door, mén in simplified characters, and this is how it looks in traditional

characters. So they use those simplified characters in mainland China as well as in Singapore.

They kept the traditional characters in Hong Kong and Taiwan. How different are the two

systems? Well about 80% of the characters are the same in simplified and traditional.

So there's not a huge difference between the two. And I think most chinese people have

enough exposure to both systems that they can read either one. The primary focus of

this course will be on simplified characters. But for the 20%of the characters that are

different in the traditional form, we will show you that version too, on the practice

sheets. Great, now let's take a look at how our lessons are organized by going over some

numbers. In this course, we are going to learn a total of 300 characters. The lessons that

are grouped into 5 levels. Each level covers a total of 60 characters .We are going to

break these 300 characters down into bite-size mini lessons, with each lesson covering 3

new characters. To help you retain what you learn, we are also going to have a lot of

review lessons. For every 15 new characters you learn, we are going to arrange a review

lesson. At the end of the course, we are going to have 3 big review lessons. we give those

300 characters a very special name, the YoYo 300, because they are like the warriors in

the movie 300, which by the way is one of my favorites. As a group, they are small but they are extremely

powerful. Together they can accomplish a lot. By knowing these 300 characters, not only

will you be able to read and type a lot of what you can already say, buy you will also

be ready to learn any other new character that comes your way, because theses 300 characters

will cover all the basic components you need to know. The YoYo 300 will give you a really

solid foundation. So how exactly will I teach you the YoYo 300? Well, I think most people

learn best if they have lots of different ways to remember a character. So each time

I introduce a new character, I will use arrange of tools from stroke order demonstrations

to cartoon illustrations to animations. There will be a lot of supplementary materials for

each lesson. After watching the video, you can practice on your own with our review worksheets.

The worksheet will include basic review and practice materials as well as a lot of bonus

stuff. For example, one of the bonuses in the review worksheet is that we are going

to show you real life images of street signs or texts that use the YoYo 300 characters.

So that you can get used to recognizing characters in all sources of authentic settings. We also

provide you an opportunity to practice your handwriting in our review worksheet. Just

in case you want to learn how to write characters by hand. You can also use it to help you recognize

chinese characters better. And lastly, we will also provide you a quiz sheet for each

lesson, which will allow you to track your own progress. Well I'm definitely ready to

get started and I hope you are too. In our next lesson, you will learn your first 3 characters.

I can't wait. Alright, see you in the YoYo 300. Zài jiàn.