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Hanzi reproduction breakthrough | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6646 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 3 09 February 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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All I knew about Chinese when I was a kid was that it had 6,000 characters and you had to memorize each and every single one. I knew that each character was a ideogram and the way you remembered them was that they all looked like the word they were describing. Something like that, something wildly off-base. To me, Mandarin was the name for those awesome little oranges they sold in a can at the grocery store.
Nowadays, a year into my Mandarin studies, I know that there are many many thousands of Hanzi, although a relatively smaller number are required to be memorized for functional literacy in the written language. I know that a handful of the thousands are ideograms, not that they look very much like what they're describing anyway. Most of them are simply a combination of a limited and relatively small number of strokes which together form a distinct morpheme that do not always, but may, constitute a whole word by itself. I know that there is no link between the character and its pronunciation; although there are hints that assist with retaining characters (张 and 长 share the same pronunciation, albeit a different tone, for a reason), those hints are not useful for ascertaining the pronunciation of an unknown character. I know that the component parts have a similar effect when it comes to retaining and ascertaining MEANING. The left-hand component of 没 comes from the symbol for "water," and yet if you used that to guess the meaning of the character, I doubt you'd ever come to the reality that it means "not." On the other hand, 游泳 means "to swim," and if you knew that, the water components in both characters might help you to hold onto that meaning. More than anything, though, I know now that it is possible to rein in and make relative order out of a seemingly chaotic system. The breakthrough came recently when I discovered that not only was I recognizing and retaining new Hanzi better, but that I was becoming a LOT better at reproducing a new character I'd only seen once. I used to have look back several times, over and over, copying each stroke one by one. Now, I can see groups of strokes as discrete components and what used to bedevil me now takes so much less time to figure out. A word like 糊涂 might look scary to a newbie, what with its 25 strokes and all. A year in, admittedly still quite the newbie, I don't see 25 strokes anymore; I see 6 components, 3 in the first character and 3 in the second. This has definitely, for me, been a huge breakthrough in my study of this language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 3 10 February 2012 at 7:14am | IP Logged | |||||
This has a very natural explanation. Just as many other characters in vernacular Mandarin, 没 is a phonetic loan. The original meaning is "to sink; to submerge", modern pronunciation "mo4" and that's still used in certain compounds. When people a number of centuries ago started to write Mandarin, the written language of China was still Literary Sinitic ("Classical Chinese"), and the Mandarin morphemes that weren't present in LS had no characters. This was of course a problem for people wanting to write Mandarin. In order to make people understand what was written, they often borrowed existing characters with a similar pronunciation (presumably "mei2" and "mo4" were more similar in pronunciation back then), relying on people knowing colloquial Mandarin to figure out what the character really stood for. A large number of Mandarin characters are like that, including some of the most frequent ones, with grammatical functions. 那，的，地，得，着，花(钱)，里(面)，什么 are all phonetic loans, or simplification of phonetic loan characters. You can discover this by seeing that they still have their original meaning intact. 那 as in 禅那 (chan2 nuo2, deep meditation), 的 as in 目的 (mu4 di4, goal), etc. Written Cantonese and Taiwanese (when written in characters) work the same way. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6646 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 3 10 February 2012 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's interesting! I imagined it happened something like that, kind of in the same vein as how Japanese kana developed, but I wasn't sure. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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