Chinese Radicals: The 螞蟻 Goes Marching

Yvonne — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:52:50 +0000

I keep failing this item in my flashcard study (I use Anki) despite its relative obviousness, so I thought I’d make a post about it because you remember things best when you try to teaching them to someone else.

ant

螞蟻
ma2 yi3

Hurrah, hurrah.

Why do I say this one should be relatively obvious? Because of the two-part structure of each word. We first discussed radicals in the espresso edition of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook.

Both 螞 and 蟻 have the same radical: 虫. In simplified Chinese, this character by itself means “insect” (in traditional Chinese, three of them get stacked together to form the character for insect: 蟲). When it appears in radical form it usually is marking an insect-related term. Other examples include:

butterfly

蝴蝶
hu2 die2

honeybee

蜜蜂
mi4 feng1

So that’s the first reason why it should be relatively obvious.

The second reason has to do with the right sides of the characters: 馬 and 義. These characters, which I should already know, are pronounced ma3 and yi4.

The third reason is that I’m already pretty fluent in Chinese. “Ant” is one of those words I absolutely know how to say, if not necessarily how to write or read.

So put that all together.

螞蟻

I see a Chinese phrase with the bug radical.
I see the right sides are ma3 and yi4, respectively. So this must be an insect word that sounds like ma yi.
I know that “ant” in Chinese is pronounced ma2 yi3.

Why do I keep failing this item?

Today I Make Your Head Explode: 今

Yvonne — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:02:35 +0000

今日わ日本語勉強します。
Kyō wa Nihongo benkyō shimasu.

“Today I am studying Japanese.” I hope. Otherwise, it’s the next edition of Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation.

And today, 今 is making my head explode. In both Chinese and Japanese, 今 means roughly “the present”.

According to Nihongo Resources, Lesson 1 今 can be pronounced as いま (ima), which means “now” or as こん (kon) like in 今晩 (konban) — “this evening” or 今日 (konnichi), “this day”. This is obviously related to 今晩は (konbanwa) and 今日は (konnichiwa) — “good evening” and “good day”.

But here the plot thickens. “Good evening” and “good day” are more commonly written as こんばんは and こんいちは, without the Kanji. So when you see 今日, it is probably pronounced kyō— and means “today”.

“This morning” is 今朝 or けさ (kesa). “Morning” is 朝 (asa), and “good morning” is おはよございます (ohayo gozaimasu).

It makes the Chinese seem positively simple in comparison. 今 (jin1) has only one pronunciation.

On the other hand, in Chinese 今朝 doesn’t mean “this morning”. 今朝, along with 今日 and 今天 all mean “today”.

Interference. I haz it.

Chipanglish » Vocabulary

Chinese Radicals: The 螞蟻 Goes Marching

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Today I Make Your Head Explode: 今

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