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How native 中國人 learns new characters? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| xtam1 Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 4853 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 1 of 11 23 November 2013 at 8:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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When native Chinese person sees new, unknown character - how one learns it? :
-knows pronunciation and meaning by basing it on/from radicals or -has to check pronunciation and meaning(if yes - where? in dictionary?) and memorize it to use later? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5957 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 11 23 November 2013 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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They use a dictionary. The native speakers whom I know have mentioned looking things up by the radical. Edited by Snowflake on 23 November 2013 at 5:52pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| catullus_roar Quadrilingual Octoglot Groupie Australia Joined 4566 days ago 89 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Malay, Hokkien*, English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, French, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, Latin, Armenian, Afrikaans, Russian | Message 3 of 11 25 November 2013 at 10:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=37301&PN=1&TPN=1
The above thread may be of interest to you, I've written some things about how as a Chinese native (not from China though), I learned Chinese in kindergarten. Once upon a time, we used to check everything using radicals. With the advent of hanyu pinyin, however, we now check using hanyu pinyin. For example, if I didn't know the meaning of 'shu', for tree, I'd go to the dictionary (like an English dictionary) and flip through she, shi, shu... And I'd find the shu with the right intonation (in this case the 4th sound), and I'd find the correct character there. Most Chinese schoolchildren also use electronic dictionaries, where they just key in the hanyu pinyin. Of course, if you don't know the hanyu pinyin, you have to use radicals. How do we use radicals? First, we count how many 'brushstrokes' there are per radical. 'Shu', meaning tree, has the 'wood' radical which has 4 brushstrokes. At the front of every paper dictionary, there will be a section where radicals are grouped together by the number of their brushstrokes. After finding the 'wood' radical, I count the number of brushstrokes that 'Shu' has in total, which is 9 including the 'wood' radical. Then, under the section '9' of the 'wood radical' section, I will probably find the page number for 'shu'. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 11 26 November 2013 at 7:05am | IP Logged | |||||
This surprises me. Several people have told me they use radicals to look up unknown dictionaries, even in recent years. Yet the ubiquity of smartphones has surely made this cumbersome method obsolete? Nowadays you can use the handwritten input system on the phone or on a tablet and it's so much quicker and easier than lookup by radical. Yet few people seem to be doing this. This seems to be true even in Hong Kong, where nobody uses pinyin for obvious reasons. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 5 of 11 26 November 2013 at 8:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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If I may react (as a non-native) to Ari's comment, using a paper dictionary, if the character is absolutely unknown of course you must go to the radical section, but it is slow: find where the radical index is, count the number of strokes (even if quick, you still need to do it), find the page number and flip to that number.
But if you can guess the pronunciation (which you often can? Well I use paper dictionaries for Classical Chinese, so I often know how the character is pronounced in modern Mandarin), then you directly flip to the right page. At least, after having to look up dozens of characters, I've found that if I could guess the pronunciation (and that pronunciation didn't have as many characters as "shi"...), then I'd skip the radical+stroke lookup. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 11 26 November 2013 at 9:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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On a side note, the topic title is also transparent to a Korean speaker :D
(and yes, I don't understand why you don't use the computer input anyways. I don't handwrite often and I would be particularly annoyed if I had to do so in Chinese Edited by tarvos on 26 November 2013 at 9:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| catullus_roar Quadrilingual Octoglot Groupie Australia Joined 4566 days ago 89 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Malay, Hokkien*, English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, French, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, Latin, Armenian, Afrikaans, Russian | Message 7 of 11 26 November 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged | |||||
How old are the people you've been talking to? Everyone under the age of 20 nowadays uses hanyu pinyin to look for things. May just be a demographic thing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 11 26 November 2013 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not sure if you misread my comment. I'm saying when people don't know the pronunciation, they'll use radical lookup, when handwriting input is availible on all smartphones and checking the dictionary is as easy as writing the character on the screen with your finger. No need for radicals or pinyin. And I said nobody uses pinyin in Hong Kong, which is natural because people don't speak Mandarin in Hong Kong. Pinyin is pretty useless if you don't know the Mandarin pronunciation of the character. Actually, I found lots of people, inclusing many young people, couldn't use pinyin in Foshan when I lived there, even though they lived in mainland China. People who speak Mandarin with an accent can have difficulty knowing for example which characters have the pinyin "si" and which have the pinyin "shi", since they pronounce them the same way. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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