9 ms·

The Way of Chinese Language

codevark 8y ago
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok. (Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)
- jumelles 8y ago
  English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.
  - petecox 8y ago
    For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU
- girzel 8y ago
  I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
  - schoen 8y ago
    Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p... (that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
    - iamshs 8y ago
      Punjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        There's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.
- schoen 8y ago
  English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."
  - natch 8y ago
    >There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".
        _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
dougdonohoe 8y ago
Hey this was pretty interesting - the most in-depth introduction to Chinese characters I've seen.
KayL 8y ago
"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象" The animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File:Oracle_bone_graphs_rotated_90_degrees.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Go to http://hanziyuan.net http://hanziyuan.net and put in 象. It's not hard to see the elephant. I particularly like B14607.
theli0nheart 8y ago
This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt. Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.
- schoen 8y ago
  I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated. I imagine that someone could choose to make deliberate progress on this skill, even though it's not at all a common approach to teaching or learning Chinese. I can report that I know that San Francisco is called 旧金山, and that I know the meaning of each of the three characters as well as their meaning together, but I don't know the sound of any of them. If I heard someone refer to San Francisco in spoken Chinese, I would have no idea what was being referred to, but if I saw it written, I would! I've also seen Chinese speakers who don't know any Japanese understand the basic meaning of signs in Japanese, and vice versa, because often individual hanzi and kanji continue to share their most basic or common meanings (though by no means always). I realize this is also a far cry from being able to read a newspaper fluently, but I find it very suggestive, since most likely the speakers in question wouldn't be able to read these signs aloud! Edit: but in support of your intuition about this, Wiktionary, for example, lists 256 Chinese words that use (for example) 市, a huge number of which probably don't have a transparent meaning to a non-Chinese speaker who knows all the individual characters in a given word. And it's a similar situation with other characters, so at least it would require a lot of deliberate study to understand complex texts.
girzel 8y ago
Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix. 义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning. But all in all, pretty good!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ar7hur 8y ago
[Shameless plug] My own take on the birth, evolution and Mao's simplification of Chinese writing: https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1 https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1
chillacy 8y ago
> In some cases, characters are composed of two parts: a radical element and a pronunciation hint Actually something like 80% of characters are phonetic-semantic. More info: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th...
forkLding 8y ago
Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification. Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app) The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes. This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).
- intertextuality 8y ago
  Stroke order is also important when writing fast or sloppy. Depending on the stroke order the slants/angles of the strokes will be different, obviously, which lets you deduce a character if someone has written it sloppily (but with the right order). I've had to do this many a time when deciphering quickly-written native korean handwriting. Beginner learners often write ㅁ wrong, making it almost look like a ㅇ.
- adrianN 8y ago
  In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper dictionaries anymore. The only benefit I can see is in the ability to read handwritten characters. The "cursive" script is basically impossible to read unless you know the stroke order really well.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.
    - adrianN 8y ago
intertextuality 8y ago
Mandarin does have words. Sometimes you can deduce a meaning of a compound word from the literal meanings of the characters it's made up of, but sometimes you cannot. It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.
franciscop 8y ago
As someone who learned English from Spanish, this strikes me as totally off: > In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!
chagel 8y ago
Happy Chinese New Year! I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.

In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok. (Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)

jumelles 8y ago
English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.
- petecox 8y ago
  For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU
girzel 8y ago
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
- schoen 8y ago
  Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p... (that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
  - iamshs 8y ago
    Punjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      There's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.
schoen 8y ago
English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."
- natch 8y ago
  >There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".
      - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
        Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago

dougdonohoe 8y ago

Hey this was pretty interesting - the most in-depth introduction to Chinese characters I've seen.

KayL 8y ago

"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象" The animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File:Oracle_bone_graphs_rotated_90_degrees.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Go to http://hanziyuan.net http://hanziyuan.net and put in 象. It's not hard to see the elephant. I particularly like B14607.

theli0nheart 8y ago

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt. Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.

schoen 8y ago
I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated. I imagine that someone could choose to make deliberate progress on this skill, even though it's not at all a common approach to teaching or learning Chinese. I can report that I know that San Francisco is called 旧金山, and that I know the meaning of each of the three characters as well as their meaning together, but I don't know the sound of any of them. If I heard someone refer to San Francisco in spoken Chinese, I would have no idea what was being referred to, but if I saw it written, I would! I've also seen Chinese speakers who don't know any Japanese understand the basic meaning of signs in Japanese, and vice versa, because often individual hanzi and kanji continue to share their most basic or common meanings (though by no means always). I realize this is also a far cry from being able to read a newspaper fluently, but I find it very suggestive, since most likely the speakers in question wouldn't be able to read these signs aloud! Edit: but in support of your intuition about this, Wiktionary, for example, lists 256 Chinese words that use (for example) 市, a huge number of which probably don't have a transparent meaning to a non-Chinese speaker who knows all the individual characters in a given word. And it's a similar situation with other characters, so at least it would require a lot of deliberate study to understand complex texts.

girzel 8y ago

Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix. 义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning. But all in all, pretty good!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ar7hur 8y ago

[Shameless plug] My own take on the birth, evolution and Mao's simplification of Chinese writing: https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1 https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1

chillacy 8y ago

> In some cases, characters are composed of two parts: a radical element and a pronunciation hint Actually something like 80% of characters are phonetic-semantic. More info: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th...

forkLding 8y ago

Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification. Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app) The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes. This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).

intertextuality 8y ago
Stroke order is also important when writing fast or sloppy. Depending on the stroke order the slants/angles of the strokes will be different, obviously, which lets you deduce a character if someone has written it sloppily (but with the right order). I've had to do this many a time when deciphering quickly-written native korean handwriting. Beginner learners often write ㅁ wrong, making it almost look like a ㅇ.
adrianN 8y ago
In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper dictionaries anymore. The only benefit I can see is in the ability to read handwritten characters. The "cursive" script is basically impossible to read unless you know the stroke order really well.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.
  - adrianN 8y ago

intertextuality 8y ago

Mandarin does have words. Sometimes you can deduce a meaning of a compound word from the literal meanings of the characters it's made up of, but sometimes you cannot. It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.

franciscop 8y ago

As someone who learned English from Spanish, this strikes me as totally off: > In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!

chagel 8y ago

Happy Chinese New Year! I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.