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Chinese characters hard to learn? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7227 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 25 of 40 11 July 2006 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Seldnar:
Really? As a matter of fact it was the Taiwanese Mandarin translation of "The Prisoner of Azkaban", but I generally find those translations to be of much higher quality than the Mainland ones. I read the Mainland translation of the first Harry Potter book, but when Harry asked Hagrid what the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite was, only to be told that that 钟乳石 (Zhong1 Ru3 Shi2, the Chinese word for stalactite) has an 'M' in the middle, I died a little on the inside. I found that translation far too literal to make good reading, and there were a few outright errors like that. Of course, I've only read the Mainland translation of the first book, the Taiwanese translation of the third book, and none of the books in English, so I'm not in a great position to compare. As for your second statement, it's true that combinations are also very important, but I'm sure you'll agree that characters are an important foundation for learning combinations of characters :p 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| seldnar Senior Member United States Joined 7136 days ago 189 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, French, Greek | Message 26 of 40 11 July 2006 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cthulhu,
Ooops, I hope I didn't make it sound as if characters weren't worth learning :-) I did learn early on (year 3?) that number of characters learnt did not equal number of words learnt. It was the first HP that I read in the Taiwanese translation. It was quite difficult and full of anglcisms. As for the Mainland editions, well, I have to confess I've not read an entire one; I would read chapters here and there while bookshopping in Beijing and Shanghai this past spring. They appeared to be better but I have to say I wasn't giving them my full attention while in the store. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| braveb Senior Member United States languageprograms.blo Joined 7201 days ago 264 posts - 263 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 27 of 40 19 July 2006 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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What about assigning a number for each radical and "derivitive"? There are 214 radicals, so for sure you would need 214 peg words. Take her/she for instance. There is number 38(woman) and another character, let's call it 215 since it's not a radical. 215 transponds to N..D...L(needle). So movie and needle could mean a movie about needles...the Hellraiser series? So then her/she equals Hellraiser. 38,215 = she/her? At least using a dictionary would be easy, knowing all the radicals by number.
Maybe too much work in the long run? Or I could just wait for Heisig's book on Hanzi that's supposed to be released sometime next spring. As for pronunciation, I don't think one could make a memory system out of it, so one would just have to learn it by context ala Assimil. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 40 19 July 2006 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A book* I have teaches the radicals with peg words, something which definitely would simplify using a dictionary and word memorization.
* "A beginner's Chinese-English dictionary" by W. Simon (1958) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7025 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 29 of 40 26 November 2006 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In reading some of these old posts, one thing that I did not see addressed was combinations of characters. Many Mandarin words are composed of blocks of 2,3, or even 4 characters. Just knowing the meaning of individual characters does not mean that you will understand the meaning of the blocks of characters. Further, in Chinese text, the characters are all evenly spaced, so a poor foreigner may not know where breaks between words are supposed to occur. I am sure anyone who has studied the language knows these things. No offense Keith, but I think you are sugar-coating the difficulty of Chinese literacy!
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| hagen Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6964 days ago 171 posts - 179 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 30 of 40 28 November 2006 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, learning characters is no substitute for learning vocabulary, of course.
I think this is mainly a problem for beginners. As soon as you know a basic amount of characters and vocabulary, the probability of two unknown words occuring next to each other is rather low, so you can just look up the unknown word in between the known ones. And even if you come across unknown compounds, you will probably have some intuition about how they split up (mostly into two-syllable blocks). A pesky little nuisance are personal names, though. (If the family name is not one of the frequent ones, I keep trying to look them up in the dictionary for quite a while until I realize that it's a name!) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lyanna Newbie United States Joined 6624 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 31 of 40 30 November 2006 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I tend to think that context counts for a lot. My family is Chinese but I’ve gotten all my formal schooling in the U.S., and to this day I can’t write a letter to my grandfather without reaching for a dictionary three times in a sentence. I’m sure I recognize much fewer than the recommended 4000-5000 characters, but I’m making it through one of the pre-1918 vernacular classics, “The Water Margin.” It might be that it’s not how many characters you know or even how many character combinations you know: It’s how thoroughly you know the ones you *do* know. The difference between me – essentially a native speaker without full-fledged literacy – and some of you guys who are studying the language, is that even if we were both baffled by the exact same characters in a given sentence, it would probably be easier for me to get the meaning.
You should always push yourself to read hard texts, of course, but the advantage of repeatedly seeing familiar characters in every conceivable context is that when you’re faced with an unfamiliar one, these old friends can be of invaluable assistance in deducing its meaning. Then, when you finally figure out what the new word means, you’ll be able to retain it more easily than if you’d just memorized it in a vocab list, because you can now recall it in context. I don’t know if my reasoning is correct, as I’ve never had to learn Chinese “from scratch,” so I’ll leave it to those of you who know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bunni Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6557 days ago 13 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, French, Spanish, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, Swahili, Twi | Message 32 of 40 16 December 2006 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find that if a person just learns the main radicals needed to compose other characters, literacy in Chinese and languages that use Chinese characters becomes a lot easier to achieve.
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