Plum blossom Plum blossom ranks among the top ten famous flowers in China. It originated in southern China and has a history of more than 3,000 years of cultivation and planting. In the middle of winter, the colorful plum blossoms are not afraid of the cold, and bloom proudly against the snow. In traditional Chinese culture, plum blossoms symbolize strength, purity, elegance, and encourage people to fear hardships and move forward. Since ancient times, many poets and painters have taken inspiration from plum blossoms and created countless immortal works. The general public also loves plum blossoms, which are often used for home decoration during the Spring Festival. Nanjing City has designated the plum blossom as the city flower, and every year a plum blossom festival is held, and thousands of people braved the cold to the plum blossom mountain to enjoy the plum blossoms

I explain why you study Chinese difficultly Chinese is a pictographic language. We use characters record information rather than words. The foreign learners will focus on the word memorizing , and they tend to memorize pinyin of words first. Because the pinyin is more easy for them to memorize. That is the problem. when you only remember the pinyin (pronunciation) of the words , you may write a wrong character. for example, you want to write 汉字（hanzi）, and you type it by pinyin inputting app. it will give you the optional words, first 汉子，second 汉字，if you don't remember the right Chinese character, you tend to type the 汉子，which is wrong here, instead of the right one 汉字. so you must memorize Chinese characters when you are learning vocabulary. I know it is tough, so does it for native speakers. When we are at primary school , we exercise to write the characters for two classes every day. and parents will asked children to recognize the characters they meet everywhere. finally，we can master appropriate 2000 characters when we are in grade three at primary school. if you can recognize 2000 character you would read newspapers and common books. After that , we start to write a simple notebook about topics like my family, diary. when we are in five grade, we can write an essay with 500 characters. Note that we don't use the number of words as a requirement for an essay，but we use that of characters. Characters is the minimum unit, not words. We seldom memorize 电脑（computer），we learn 电(electricity) and 脑(brain) separately. Compounding is a very important word formation. we will combine 电 and 脑 into 电脑, a compound word. the combination of words is flexible. we can also make up plenty of words like 电水壶（kettle）电话(telephone) 电灯(lamp), and so on. almost all the words that contains two or more characters is compound words. Actually , Chinese characters correspond to English words, while Chinese words correspond to English compound words.Thus, we can use 2000 characters to create numerous words expressing all the meaning besides professional subject. So I suggest not to memorize words but the characters, then combine them into various words. That would be interesting and effective.