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A simple explanation of Chinese characters
- shalmanese 11y agoThis article glides over the process of learning Chinese but the nature of the language makes it significantly harder to learn: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- rahimnathwani 11y agoThat (nice!) article gives 9 reasons. Only 6 of them are applicable in 2015. #3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. #5 is no longer true, as dictionaries are now on Pleco. Yes, I found it hard to look up words in a paper dictionary when I started learning. But, for today's learners, their first dictionary is Pleco on iOS/Android, and this pain is gone. #7 is a weird one. You only need one romanization method (Pinyin) to learn Chinese, or to look up the standard (Mandarin) pronunciation of a new character. When would I ever need to use or read Wade-Giles, or any other romanization method, unless I'm reading the romanized version of a Taiwan/HK person's surname?
- isolate 11y agoPeople write with pens often. Although characters per second is much faster on a computer, there's less total overhead to writing with pen and paper in many situations.
- adrianN 11y agoRegarding #3, there are efforts in China to prevent "character amnesia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473
- douche 11y agoWade-Giles is used very, very widely in English-language historical writing. Particularly anything that is more than about twenty years old. So you have to know what the names of people and places are in both Pinyin and Wade-Giles, and often enough in whatever less-standard romanization the author happened to use.
- xiaoma 11y ago>#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. First of all, this isn't true. Every convenience store in China sells pens. Billions of pens are sold per year in China. Even at the tech company where I worked in China, everyone had a pen or pencil and some wrote notes with them. People often used markers and wrote things on whiteboards, too. It was pretty much the same in that sense as English speaking places. Secondly, the main point in #3 wasn't about writing. It was about learning. If you see a few taquerias in Mexico with "Taqueria" written in the sign, you'll learn a new word and how to pronounce it. You might later realize you've been hearing the word "taqueria" in a radio commercial and suddenly understand more of it. In China, you could enter a post office, see 郵局 written on it and hear the word 郵局 in conversation every day for a month and still not understand what it is people are saying. That is why the writing system slows learners down, even if comprehension is their goal.
- rahimnathwani 11y agoYou're right, especially about the reinforcement bit. There are some characters that I can recognise, because I've seen them often enough on Taobao, but don't come up in every day conversation. So, I don't know how to pronounce them, and wouldn't recognise them if someone said them out loud.
- bubalus 11y ago#1 through 3 are all saying the same general thing #5 no longer matters because there are online dictionaries that let you draw the character you want to look up #7: What's wrong with Hanyu Pinyin? But it is true that the gulf between English and Chinese is bigger than the gulf between English and a lot of other European languages.
- Chathamization 11y agoEh, the complaints about the characters seem mostly overblown. I think I picked up about 2,000 in a year, and that was not studying particularly hard. Past a certain point most of the new characters are combinations of characters you've already studied. Of course, if you're not practicing your reading it's . Also, if you have at least a decent level in the language it's not going to be unfamiliar characters that give you trouble in newspaper articles (most of the unfamiliar characters you run into will be from names or chengyu), but Chinese words your unfamiliar with. And in these cases, the characters actually help; you're going to have a much easier time guessing what "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis" mean in Chinese than in English.
- davelnewton 11y agoStrokes aren't important only for muscle memory and how to remember the characters--the order also helps with symmetry and the overall shape/size of the finished character.
- progers7 11y agoAnother fun part of Chinese is that most characters are monosyllabic. This makes numbers easy to remember and, on average, Chinese speakers can remember a few more random digits than English speakers can.
- UIZealot 11y agoActually, ALL Chinese characters are monosyllabic.
- hunvreus 11y agoFrom my experience, this article brushes a very rosy picture of the Chinese language. The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don't know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it's simple enough, you may guess, but that's it. Learning Chinese means memorizing characters. A lot of them. It takes over a decade to teach a Chinese kid to even read a simple magazine. Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. This is why building a search engine in Chinese is so hard. You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least). Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. Since you don't separate words with spaces in Chinese, good luck figuring things out programmatically. Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context. Learning Chinese can be an interesting challenge, but understand that it will mostly rely on memorizing characters with little to no logic or trick to help you do so.
- isolate 11y ago> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You can't use Chinese tones, but you can still modulate your speech tonally to convey emotion while respecting them.
- agrand 11y agoThis, and the use of particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle
- westiseast 11y agoYeah - my son has a hundred ways to say 没有 that are playful, angry, bossy, funny, etc. It is part of the language, you just use different vocal variations than the classic English ones like 'raise your tone to indicate a question', or 'use harsh dropping tones to indicate anger'
- lifthrasiir 11y agoI should mention the Mark Rosenfelder's thorough introduction to Chinese characters [1]. [1] http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
- cromwellian 11y agoIf you want to learn to write Chinese characters, I recommend Skritter mobile app. It took me only a month to commit about 300 characters to memory with 85% accuracy (incidentally, mostly the same 300 characters I had completely forgotten when I learned them 10 years ago) I would recommend up front, to spend more time practicing speaking and listening, and not obsess too much about the characters, although you will eventually need to learn them. I learned the opposite way and I regret it, in the sense that I spent a lot of time learning to read Chinese, especially vocabulary through Pinyin, and while I know about 1000 words now, enough for basic conversation, my listening skills are horrible. I can speak, but I don't recognize what people are saying in response because I mentally spend too much time trying to assemble the phonemes and translate them via "slow brain" The best thing you can do to learn honestly, is to join a group, or find native speakers to practice with. Today it's easier than ever with online chat through HelloChinese or Verbling, or other mechanisms over Skype or Hangouts. I found lots of local groups on meetup.com where native speakers help learners practice Chinese and in return, native English speakers help them with their English. Something about face-to-face practice helps burn things into your mental muscle memory more than independent study via reading.
- audunw 11y agoI started out deciding I would never bother learning the Chinese characters and only focus on speech and listening. But eventually I hit a point where I started to get a strong desire to learn them. I got really curious about them, and wanted to be able to read signs and menus. So I spent a year getting my reading skills up to about the same level as my listening/speaking. I think that was a nice way to do it. Learning to read helps with listening/speaking skills too, but it's way too daunting to try to learn chinese characters until you can actually speak. Thanks for the tip for the app. I used Memrise myself.
- agrand 11y agoSkritter is not only more efficient than other methods of learning Chinese writing by orders of magnitude, it's also fun to use.
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- singularity2001 11y ago> this article brushes a very rosy picture of the Chinese language. That's a nice euphemism. From my experience Chinese is a historically grown mess.
- reuven 11y agoA rosy picture inevitably includes a number of thorns... I'm learning Chinese, and am having a wonderful time doing so. But there's no doubt that there's a great deal of historical baggage with the language, which is bewildering and exhilarating at the same time.
- yen223 11y agoThere are only two kinds of languages - the ones with historical baggage, and the ones nobody uses.
- Gigablah 11y agoIf you think that's a mess, wait till you learn the history of English...
- porsupah 11y agoRelatedly, people might find Tan Huey Peng's "Fun with Chinese Characters" series of books enjoyable. Each entry offers an archaic writing, and its current form, outlining the origins of each, as well as the stroke ordering. Sadly, it seems the series fell out of print, but it's available on iBooks (but not Kindle, apparently): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fun-with-chinese-characters/id546957317?mt=11 https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fun-with-chinese-characters...
- tragomaskhalos 11y agoI'm no sinologist but found this book fascinating: "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis (ISBN 978-0824810689)
- kqr 11y ago> The last part I interpret as something like: “the mainstream idea of shared production”, in other words, communism. This is something I love about Finnish as well. I don't know enough Finnish to say if it's a general pattern, but I've noticed that a comet is a "tail-star", a toad is a "crust-frog", the world is the "land-air" and there's a couple of other examples I've collected over the years. I'd love to learn that language.
- DonaldFisk 11y agoThere are many reasons why Chinese is difficult for English speakers to learn. (1) There are many thousands of characters, so you're effectively learning two languages at once: spoken Mandarin and written Chinese. Reading Chineasy might help you get started won't help much after that. Alphabetic languages have at most a few dozen characters. (2) There are no cognates. German and Swedish, for example, have lots of cognates recognizable to English speakers. (3) There are very few loan words. There are lots of English words in Japanese, and lots of Japanese words in English. (4) There's a huge cultural gap. (5) There are different languages all called Chinese. Learning Putonghua won't help you much with pre-revolutionary (1911) texts, as they were written in Classical Chinese. (6) Unless you go to China, the Chinese people you meet will usually speak better English than you will Mandarin, so conversations will lapse into English. On the plus side: The tones are the least of your problems, and pronouncing Chinese isn't much harder than many other languages. Chinese grammar is dead simple. It has a fixed word order, which is similar to English, and there's no inflexion. I'm also told that once you know a certain number of characters (still several thousand), you can easily guess and infer unfamiliar words. The Practical Chinese Reader series stops using English altogether once you reach Book 5. (It's been superseded by more modern texts.)
- mikeash 11y agoI've been learning Mandarin for a long time. I can understand a decent amount and I can speak pretty well, but I can't read much or write worth a damn, and my vocabulary is small. I also speak French, and learning to read and write took basically no time at all (just quickly learn some pretty regular rules, much simpler than English) and a lot of vocabulary carried over. So in short, yeah, spot on. I do think tones are a bigger problem than you let on. You can get by without them. I've met people who are pretty fluent except they just have no command of tones, and they can still understand and be understood for the most part. But the intimidation factor is huge, and even if you can be understood, people want to speak well not just adequately. I think the language would be easier to learn if we'd punt on reading and writing for the first year or two. Every curriculum I've seen incorporates writing heavily from the start. As you note, it's like learning two languages at once. That's a lot of extra effort to put in! I imagine it would be much easier to learn these effectively-two-different-languages serially rather than in parallel. Attain basic proficiency with speaking and listening, then move on to how to read and write what's already known.