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Chinese Characters... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5753 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 7 05 March 2009 at 9:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently learning Mandarin but have always been interested in the history of the Chinese characters such things as when did they start developing, the composition of Chinese characters but mostly how it has been adopted by various other languages.
Do you speak or are studying a language which uses (ore once used) Chinese characters? What are your thoughts on the difficulty of learning how to read and write them and how are Chinese characters used in languages which use Chinese characters? Lastly, how has Chinese characters (or the Chinese language itself) influenced other languages? _____________汉字___漢字___かんじ___Hán Tự___字儒____________ Besides the Chinese languages/dialects, I have heard of how Japanese still retains the characters through Kanji, Korean used Hanja and Vietnamese used Chu Nho as well as developed a script called Chu Nom. How much do you know of how these scripts work? Discuss as many questions as you like. Remember, knowledge = power! Edited by Qinshi on 05 March 2009 at 9:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5753 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 7 05 March 2009 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Here are examples:
(Note: You may need to install East Asian language fonts in order to view it) Japanese: すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由で あり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等であ る。人間は、理性と良心を授けられてあり、 互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければな らない。 Korean: 仁川廣域市 (인천광역시)는 大韓民國 中西部에 있는 廣域市이다. 大韓民國의 首都인 서울特別市, 京畿道, 忠淸南道, 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國의 黃海道와 닿아 있다. 中區 永宗島에 仁川國際空港이 있다. Vietnamese (Chu Nom): 𤾓𢆥𥪝𡎝𠊛嗟, 𡦂才𡦂命窖羅恄饒. 𣦆戈沒局𣷭橷, 仍調𥉩𧡊罵忉疸𢚸. 邏之彼嗇私豐, 𡗶青慣退𦟐紅打. Edited by Qinshi on 05 March 2009 at 10:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ninja Bunny Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5792 days ago 42 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Afrikaans, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 7 10 March 2009 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
They require effort but it's not as scary as many people say it is. When one digs into the ancestral forms and learns why the characters look the way they do, patterns begin to emerge and the written language makes total sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6148 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 4 of 7 11 March 2009 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
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My favourite character set is that of the late Spring and Autumn and Qin period, the characters are similar enough to Han Dynasty traditional characters to be barely comprehensible but there remains a sort of mystic charm. Older than that and they look quite primitive.
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| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6316 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 5 of 7 18 March 2009 at 11:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I actually find some similarity between Chinese characters and alphabets When reading in an alphabet, we tend to recognise words by the shapes of the combinations of letters. In Chinese, one recognises characters by their combinations of components, which contain elements that often (but not always) contribute the phonetic element. There are of course differences between the two, but I don't think a person is doing something radically different when reading characters as opposed to an alphabet; in both you both memorize and recognise thousands of shapes. So, I wouldn't say characters are any more difficult to learn really.
In searching, I found we had a similar thread on this a while back which sparked a long discussion. Edited by ChristopherB on 18 March 2009 at 11:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dbh2ppa Diglot Groupie Costa Rica Joined 5688 days ago 44 posts - 74 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Japanese, Sign Language | Message 6 of 7 12 July 2009 at 7:18am | IP Logged | ||
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i don't think they are all that difficult to learn, thought the japanese system of "one character, many many different readings" can get confusing at times, specially when it comes to people's names.
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| Adamdm Groupie Australia Joined 5437 days ago 62 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 7 20 January 2010 at 1:21am | IP Logged | ||
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My discovery of Rick Harbaugh's "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary" just over five years ago enabled a great leap forward in my learning of Chinese characters.
The book groups (traditional) characters according to their phonetic components, rather than the traditional radicals, and shows how characters are related to each other in a 'family tree' sense. His approach is based on that of Soothill, over 100 years ago, and is, in my opinion, much more suited to someone coming to written Chinese from 'outside', and as an adult, than are either the more usual western or Chinese approaches to teaching Chinese. This book is not so great if you are starting by learning simplified characters, but there is more etomology in the traditional ones, and I expect given your interests that you will want to study these. The author has a very useful web-site www.zhongwen.com - but it is certainly well worth buying the book itself - and, despite being described as a 'paperback', is in fact excellently and robustly bound. I have used (and still am) the information in it to make flash cards, with the character on one side, and the details of its derivation, phonetic and signific elements on the other. As for your other interests, I too am interested in this. I can contribute that the Western Xia, or Tangut, kingdom in the 11th-13th centuries AD used Chinese characters, and home-grown chinese-like characters, to write their own language, much as do/did Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_language) In the opposite direction, when the Mongols had control over China and adjoining areas, they tried to impose a phonetic script on their empire, which was made up, but based on Tibetan writing, and was intended to replace Chinese characters with an alphabet-like system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Phags-pa_script ! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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