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Chinese characters by hand — Your worst | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 17 of 29 07 October 2011 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Alright, forget everything I wrote in the OP.
This one is a wreck: 醫 It's not hard when written over 4 squares, but trying to fit it into a single one in the right proportions is another story. Often ends up looking like a seismographic recording from a high-scale earthquake rather than a comprehensible Chinese character. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Remster Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4805 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French | Message 18 of 29 10 October 2011 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Now I think this is the reason why most people won't accept Chinese writing (Mandarine speaking) as a new 'lingua franca'.
It seems to be more like drawing, rather than writing. I do have a question to the person above me, your character, does it really look like that? It looks to me as if the character is shown so small that some lines get ''tangled'' and you get some black squares and stuff. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Everplayer Diglot Groupie China Joined 5049 days ago 69 posts - 85 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: Japanese, German | Message 19 of 29 10 October 2011 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | ||
I guess most, if not all, languages started as drawings in ancient world. Many died out but Chinese survived. I think it is because Chinese evolved continuously and involved wisdom of many generations. Take 醫 as an example: it has 医 and 殳 on top, and 酉 below. Inner part of 医 is 矢，which means "arrow" and was indeed a drawing of arrow. 
Then 矢(arrow) is surrounded on three sides in 医, whose original meaning was "quiver which is never away from the body". (医 doesn't have this meaning in modern Chinese；is now used as a simplified character for 醫.) 殳 was a drawing of a hand holding a bronze polearm. It means the particular polearm. 
This character is no longer in use. When 医 and 殳 are put together, 殹 indicates the clash of the weapon with the quiver on the body in war. 酉 is a radical representing wine/alcohol, which was used as a medication in ancient China. Naturally it was used frequently on wounds in wars. This character was a drawing of wine in a phial. 
Combining everything, we have 醫, which, as a noun, means "doctor" or "medicine", and as a verb, means "to treat". Many Chinese characters have interesting stories in them. I really love discovering and learning these stories. Hope the learners of Chinese may also appreciate and get inspirations from them. :) (I apologize for being off-topic again...) References: http://www.guoxue.com/ http://vividict.com/ 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 20 of 29 10 October 2011 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
Honestly, I highly believe that those people who are not willing to learn Chinese because of the characters are those who wouldn't reach a fluent level in it anyway... I haven't learned Chinese myself, but learning the characters is certainly not as hard as it is portrayed, especially in Mandarin where characters only have 1 way of pronunciation and many characters share same radicals that indicate shared pronunciation, similar to some Hanja in Korean, like 成, 城, 誠, 盛 all pronounced 'seong (성)'. There are many more examples. About the character 醫, I've finally got it to look decent when writing it on a small square, so it's just a matter of practise. Edited by DNB on 10 October 2011 at 3:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lindseylbb Bilingual Triglot Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4932 days ago 92 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 21 of 29 10 October 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have trouble to write them near and beautiful. Some complicated ones with more that 20 strokes can be of big size...Also I love tradictional characters.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Remster Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4805 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French | Message 22 of 29 11 October 2011 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the detailed information, that was very interesting!
Your explanation makes a lot of sense and shows to me that it's not just some lines drawn together, which would've have been illogical anyway. To the next person, I consider Chinese characters to be very beautiful and imaginative. But to become a lingua franca, a language needs to gradually make it's way into business and society. (Or your country invaded half the world, like the English did). I think the transition from the latin alphabet to the chinese characters will be too difficult since the system is radically different, though both make sense in a way. In my opinion, there isn't a language which should be skipped, because it has certain features that ''may look unappealing'' to beginners. I certainly see the beauty of Chinese writing, my opinion is just that it's too different to replace English as a lingua franca. I don't think people will easily switch, nor gradually. It might, but certainly not in twenty years. Edited by Remster on 11 October 2011 at 10:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6850 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 23 of 29 12 October 2011 at 5:24am | IP Logged | ||
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It's certainly not true that Chinese characters each have only one pronunciation in Mandarin. Many have multiple pronunciations, depending on when it is used. 了 is le or liǎo; 乾 is qián or gān; 著 is zhāo, zháo, zhe, zhuó, or zhù; 和 is hē, hé, hè, hú, huō, huó, or huò; 覺 is jué or jiào. These are all very common characters. Many characters have certain pronunciations used only (or chiefly) in Classical or Literary Chinese. I'm not sure where this myth that Chinese has only one pronunciation per character comes from, but it isn't true. There is usually one pronunciation that is most common, and the situation isn't as drastic as in Japanese, but there are plenty of 多音字 (characters with several readings) in Chinese.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5173 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 24 of 29 20 October 2011 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have relatively nice handwriting in Chinese (if I may say so myself), much better
than in English anyways. And much much better than in Arabic. In Arabic, I look like I'm connecting letters instead of doing actual writing and I do not like writing from right to left. However, there are 2 words which I think I write pretty horribly which may come as a surprise considering how easy they are. These two words are... 凹 and 凸. I mean I can't draw a perfect square or a perfect circle. What makes anyone think I can write a perfect ao or a perfect tu? When I was much younger, this one was a little tricky too: 囊. I always ended up making the top too big. And since we had to write words in little boxes (one character per box), I ended up with no space for the rest of the word. Edited by strikingstar on 20 October 2011 at 4:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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