
A simple explanation of Chinese characters - agrand
https://medium.com/@adrieng/a-simple-explanation-of-chinese-characters-50f922ebe4e6#.hykxyoal9
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hunvreus
From 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.

~~~
mchaver
>> 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 seems a bit like linguistic relativity. Native speakers don't have
problems with tones. It is a challenge for second language learners of Chinese
who don't speak a tonal language. Likewise, stress patterns in English are a
challenge for second language learners but native speakers don't struggle with
it.

There is a lot of word play in Chinese. Just because a syllable has a raising
tone does not mean it is the exact same pitch as another syllable with a
raising tone later in the phrase, rather the syllables follow the same pattern
of starting from a lower pitch and go to a higher one. You can also make
vowels longer or shorter.

>> Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context.

That's the case for most languages. What does 'hit' mean in English?

He hit me. Give me a hit. That show is a hit. He hit a tree with his car. I
hit a new high. The boss ordered a hit on him. Tomorrow we will be hit by a
storm. They hit it off well. She hit on him. That hits close to home. Let's
hit the road.

~~~
mikeash
> Likewise, stress patterns in English are a challenge for second language
> learners but native speakers don't struggle with it.

This really is key. "Tones" are hugely important in English. A simple sentence
like "I didn't steal your money" has at least five different meanings
depending on which word gets stressed.

Imagine trying to learn this stuff from scratch as a non-native speaker! How
do you even teach that? Are there actual rules for it, or do you just have to
figure it out?

At least with Chinese, tones are just part of the pronunciation. A particular
word (syllable, really) has a particular tone, and that's it.

~~~
Dylan16807
You don't have to put stress on any words on that sentence in English, and it
will be sound perfectly fine. The vast majority of sentences don't stress
particular words.

~~~
jeremysmyth
You're missing the point.

\- _I_ didn't steal your money

\- I _didn 't_ steal your money

\- I didn't _steal_ your money

\- I didn't steal _your_ money

\- I didn't steal your _money_

In each case, there is an implication that is missing in the flat, no stressed
version.

~~~
Dylan16807
You could do that.

But it's not a part of a typical sentence.

You can also add implications by the gestures you make in between words. That
doesn't make English complicated, that's just an irrelevant thing you can do.

Calling such a thing 'hugely important' is just wrong. I didn't miss the
point, I think the point has no connection with actual speech.

------
cromwellian
If 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.

~~~
agrand
Skritter is not only more efficient than other methods of learning Chinese
writing by orders of magnitude, it's also fun to use.

~~~
cromwellian
Yep, it's like an addictive game, trying to "burn down" the count in the upper
left.

------
DonaldFisk
There 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.)

~~~
TACIXAT
I'm learning Mandarin right now and I love the grammar. I studied Spanish in
high school and the lack of conjugation in Chinese is superb. I even feel
sorry for people learning English now.

    
    
        我是很酷。  
        （Wǒ shì hěn kù.）     
        I am cool.
        
        你是很酷。  
        （Nǐ shì hěn kù.）     
        You are cool.
        
        他是很酷。  
        （Tā shì hěn kù.）     
        He is cool.
        
        她是很酷。  
        （Tā shì hěn kù.）     
        She is cool. 
        
        我们是很酷。
        （Wǒmen shì hěn kù.）   
        We are cool.
        
        他们是很酷。 
        (Tāmen shì hěn kù.)   
        They are cool.
    

That 是 (shì) stays consistent through all the sentences. Love it. Also the
fact that 他，她，and 它 (he， she, and it) all have the same pronunciation (tā).

~~~
agrand
Actually, you don't even need to use a verb here. 我很酷（Wǒ hěn kù）is enough.
This is probably something you didn't learn yet. You should think of it as a
sort of tarzan-talk: "Me very cool!". If you use 是, you actually put on
emphasis on the sentence. Like: "You're not cool.", "I AM cool!".

------
shalmanese
This 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
That (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?

~~~
xiaoma
> _#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
You'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.

------
lifthrasiir
I 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)

------
porsupah
Relatedly, 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...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fun-with-chinese-
characters/id546957317?mt=11)

------
kqr
> 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.

------
tragomaskhalos
I'm no sinologist but found this book fascinating: "The Chinese Language: Fact
and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis (ISBN 978-0824810689)

------
davelnewton
Strokes 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
Another 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
Actually, ALL Chinese characters are monosyllabic.

~~~
rockymeza
Well... 小孩儿 is only two syllables.

~~~
Gigablah
That's a contraction.

------
singularity2001
> 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.

~~~
yen223
There are only two kinds of languages - the ones with historical baggage, and
the ones nobody uses.

