3 ms·

You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.

by sswezey 12y ago

Symbiote 12y ago
To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
- umanwizard 12y ago
  Yup, so in Mandarin you have a vague hint as to how to pronounce each word, based on writing. Same goes for English.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    For most words you can "sound it out" in English. There are just a lot of exceptions.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  Yes, but these are based on how the words were pronounced when the character was created which means there is significant variation in the sounds the same radical is indicating.
- doodpants 12y ago
  I'm guessing that the people who decided that those characters bore any resemblance to a horse or a woman are the same people responsible for naming the constellations.
  - Kronopath 12y ago
    That's because you're seeing them after literally thousands of years of evolution and simplification. 马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology) Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)
  - gbog 12y ago
    Quite the opposite. Once you have engraved in your brain the shape of these characters they become the very representative shapes of the things they draw. It is not a matter of resemblance, just as most caricatures do not resemble the model, but the model is still immediately recognized. Another analogy is the sign indicating lifts in airports: it do not resemble any kind of real life lifts, but everyone still understand it, without even having a sound for it. So are Chinese characters. If you don't believe me I'll pardon you: a long familiarity with them is required here.

You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.

by sswezey 12y ago

You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.

To a point, but there are clues: 马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation. 女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman. Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother. (I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)

umanwizard 12y ago
Yup, so in Mandarin you have a vague hint as to how to pronounce each word, based on writing. Same goes for English.
- rhino369 12y ago
  For most words you can "sound it out" in English. There are just a lot of exceptions.
emodendroket 12y ago
Yes, but these are based on how the words were pronounced when the character was created which means there is significant variation in the sounds the same radical is indicating.
doodpants 12y ago
I'm guessing that the people who decided that those characters bore any resemblance to a horse or a woman are the same people responsible for naming the constellations.
- Kronopath 12y ago
  That's because you're seeing them after literally thousands of years of evolution and simplification. 马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology) Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)
- gbog 12y ago
  Quite the opposite. Once you have engraved in your brain the shape of these characters they become the very representative shapes of the things they draw. It is not a matter of resemblance, just as most caricatures do not resemble the model, but the model is still immediately recognized. Another analogy is the sign indicating lifts in airports: it do not resemble any kind of real life lifts, but everyone still understand it, without even having a sound for it. So are Chinese characters. If you don't believe me I'll pardon you: a long familiarity with them is required here.