Today, my topic is changes in Chinese characters.

Chinese culture is broad and profound. And I think, Chinese characters are also an important part of Chinese culture.

At first, there was Oracle Bone Inscriptions. It was an ancient language. It was written on tortoise shell or animal bones. It recorded the political and economic situation in the Shang Dynasty.

Then, there was inscriptions on ancient bronze objects （jin wen）。

Look at the picture! It was popular in the Zhou Dynasty.

Next, there was seal character （zhuan shu）。 It was used in Qin Dynasty.

Then, let’s look at this picture. It is called official script （li shu）。It was usually very flat. It was begun to use in the Qin Dynasty. It became the most popular in the Han Dynasty.

This is regular script （kai shu）。 As its name, it is very regular. It is very popular now, too.

This is running script （xing shu）。 It depended on the regular script. It is between the regular script and cursive. The most famous writing of running script is Lan Tingxu.

Let’s talk about cursive. Some of the strokes are not written, so we sometimes cannot understand it well. There were many famous people who wrote cursive well, like: Zhang Xu, Huai su, and so on.

And even now, we have differences between the traditional characters and simplified characters. The traditional characters are difficult to write. And the simplified characters are easier. But the traditional characters are a tradition of China. So I think, we can write simplified characters in our everyday life, and study the traditional characters in our free time if we want.