
The Way of Chinese Language - thevivekpandey
http://thevivekpandey.github.io/posts/2019-02-02-way-of-chinese-language.html
======
theli0nheart
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.

~~~
namelosw
Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not.

Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means
"Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more
like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating".

There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means
"naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" means "real(ly)". This does not make
sense at all.

Still, most of the words are just between these two categories. For example
"自然" means "nature", and "自" means "itself" and "然" means "happened". So
"nature" means "it just happened itself". This is kind of make sense somehow
but it is actually pretty blurred for most people.

~~~
powerapple
天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense,
but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another
language.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It’s not just a translation issue, but that the composition is just archaic.
The constituents had real meaning a long time ago when they became a word, but
today you just understand 天真 as its own word and move on. If you didn’t know
that word but understood 天 and 真 you wouldn’t be able to figure out the word’s
meaning.

The same is true with many English words as well actually: many of them
started out as composites that were meaningful in the last but today are not.
For example, “understand.”

------
chillacy
> 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-th...](https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-
key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/)

------
forkLding
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.

------
franciscop
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!

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

------
bayesian_horse
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).

~~~
adrianN
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
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.

~~~
xiaomai
I can read a few thousand characters (I pick up new characters by adding
flashcards (using Anki) when reading novels written in Chinese). At this point
I rarely encounter characters I can't read (but there are frequently words I
don't know).

I can only write a handful of characters (probably less than 100?).

I probably would get the characters mixed up less frequently if I practiced
writing them, but I don't think I would have been able to learn so many if I
was doing that.

~~~
bayesian_horse
That sounds like you actually did practice writing the characters at the
beginning. Which is my strategy also.

------
girzel
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!

------
KayL
"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象"

The animals:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File:Oracle_bone_graphs_rotated_90_degrees.svg)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Go to [http://hanziyuan.net](http://hanziyuan.net) and put in 象. It's not hard
to see the elephant.

I particularly like B14607.

------
intertextuality
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.

------
ar7hur
[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)

------
chagel
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”.

------
codevark
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.)

~~~
schoen
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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)

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
>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_
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?"

~~~
natch
No, you’re talking about a different thing.

Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different
ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in
Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it
other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is
happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases
rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.

But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But
calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that
you were talking about with your example sentences.

~~~
natch
Compare:

Did HE contract the disease?

Did he CONTRACT the disease?

In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun
describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with
the other words listed.

Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce
“contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the
examples.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
This is what I get from your examples - four possibilites:

1\. Did HE contráct the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who
got infected with the disease?"

2\. Did HE cóntract the disease? - "Was it that person (or someone else) who
commissioned a third party (to create?) the disease?"

3\. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and
the disease that he got infected with the disease, or something else?"

4\. Did he CÓNTRACT the disease? - "Is the thing that happened with him and
the disease that he got a third party to create the disease, or something
else?"

The ALLCAPS is likely focus prosody, but there's still a differenced from
'catching' and 'commissioning' which is usually referred to a difference in
the placement of 'stress' within the word - whether it's on the first syllable
or the second syllable (in this case). Since English is stress-timed, it also
affects vowel quality. But that's rather different from tone. (Or, to abstract
away from terminology the difference between English 'cóntract' (commission)
and 'contráct' (catch) is different from what goes on in Mandarin with tone
distinguishing between lexical items.)

~~~
natch
Actually your four don't capture my meaning. There is one missing.

3\. Did he CONTRÁCT the disease? .. 5\. Did HE contráct the disease?

Does that make it more clear? In other words, these sentences show the same
"tones" (different from "tone"), but different stress.

You were saying tones are just stress, but they are not. The stress here is
different from the tones.

With #3, the stress is on "contract"; with #5, the stress is on "he"; the
"tones" (again in quotes because we don't really use that word for it in
English, although I'm saying the underlying phenomenon is the same) are the
same in both, although the stress is different.

You can change the tones and the stresses independently of each other, and
when you change the tones of the syllables, you get different meanings for the
words.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I think we're using 'stress' and 'tones' to refer to completely different
things. I think you're using 'stress' to mean something like what I would call
'focus prosody', and you're using 'tones' to mean what I would call 'stress'.
But, in terms of the acoustics, 'focus prosody' is closer to Mandarin lexical
tones (though not in function).

