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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.

It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.

A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!

For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:55AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:55AM (#277526) Journal

    More interestingly for me, is that there are over a dozen ways to pronounce a single word or letter, all with different meaning.

    There's generally only one way to pronounce a given Chinese character (there are a few exceptions), so one you know the pronunciation of one character, you know how to read it in all contexts. It also gives you hints for pronunciation when it's in other contexts as a radical (that is, part of the whole sign).

    "Horse" is a good example. 马, or mǎ, has the falling-rising tone.
    "Mother" is 妈, or mā, the even tone. Note that the right half of that character is the radical for horse, so you can guess the character for mother is going to be some tone of "ma." The left-hand radical is that for "woman," so you can guess the character has something to do with women.
    Further, "scold" is 骂, or mà, the falling tone. The bottom half of that character is the radical for horse again, the top half is two radicals for "mouth," side by side.
    吗, or ma, empty tone, is the syllable you put on the end of a sentence to make it a question. Again, the horse radical is in there to give you a hint about pronunciation.

    Add that all up and you have the famous Chinese tongue-twister, 妈骂马吗?, or mā mà mǎ ma?

    You don't need special hearing to detect the difference. You pick it up eventually, and context helps a lot. I also did once hear an explanation of tones that did make sense for an English speaker. Consider the different tones you'd use in saying the following "no's":

    A: "Do you want to come with us, yes or no?"
    B: "Mmm, no..."
    A: "C'mon, you have to come."
    B: "No! I have work to do."
    A: "No? Well fine, stay here and be a stick in the mud, then."

    In the English it's all shades of meaning, extra connotations beyond the literal meaning of "no." In Chinese it's like that, minus the connection of the literal meaning. It's just different meanings.

    So you get used to it. If you stay long enough, it becomes second nature. I had a friend who stayed in China several years longer than I whom I spoke to when she had just returned. She tried to speak English tonally and we laughed ourselves silly over it.

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