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A Simple Explanation of Chinese Characters

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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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Original Submission

• Why Chinese is so damn hard. (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:27PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @08:27PM (#277875)

  This is the most complete description of why Chinese is such a terrible language to learn:

  Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, by David Moser [pinyin.info].

  Some interesting excerpts:

  After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

  And:

  When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball!

  But my favorite is:

  I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment.

  I actually had that same experience; two native Chinese Ph.D. students that couldn't help me figure out the legend in a graph, in a technical paper. Google helped me out with most of the text, but some of images were really puzzling. They admitted they don't read technical papers in Chinese; if the research is any good, it'll be published in an English-speaking conference/journal; therefore they were not familiar with the Chinese translations of the technical terms.

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