Reading Between the Lines
January 27th, 2009 | View Comments
As I mentioned in the introduction, I’m functionally illiterate in Chinese. I believe that this is related to me having the spoken vocabulary of a ten-year-old. I’m fluent enough for day-to-day living and conversation, but I’m not going to be debating theories of autism in Mandarin any time soon. I feel like if I was literate enough to start reading news or basic books in Chinese, I would acquire the more advanced/specialized vocabulary quickly.
I received a copy of Beginning Chinese Reader for Christmas. The early lessons are pretty easy—I did have over a decade of formal training in Chinese, after all—giving me plenty of “cognitive headroom” to notice things that aren’t very relevant to the main content.
Like the pictograms. They probably did this to ease the reader into a totally foreign writing system. Each Chinese character in the vocabulary list is accompanied with a line drawing, purportedly the primitive origin of said character.
For example, 日 (ri4—sun/day) looks kind of like a sun. 月(yue4—moon) looks kind of like a crescent moon.
And 女(nu3—female) looks like a hula dancer while 子 (zi3—son) looks like a big-headed baby.
But is it just me or does the pictogram for 山 (shan1—mountain) look like a bonfire while the one for 火 (huo3—fire) looks like 山?
And what is this? I don’t know about you, but that thing below 心 does not look like “a heart inside the chest cavity” to me.
The pictograms disappear after the fourth lesson. Which disappointed me because I was looking forward to see what they’d come up with for some of the more complex characters, like 電 (dien4—electricity).
One of the things the book does do well is to include compound words in the vocabulary list for each lesson. It’s part of what makes reading Chinese difficult—just knowing the individual characters isn’t enough. You have to know the sometimes unpredictable compounds in order to make sense of the passage.
Some are straightforward: 工 means “work” and 人 means “person”. A 工人 is a worker.
Some are more…suggestive: 山 means “mountain” and 水 means “water”, but 山水 means “landscape”.
And some seem nearly arbitrary: 小 means “small” and 心 means “heart”, but 小心 means “be careful”.
Especially if your heart looks like that pictogram. You might want to have that checked out.
Yvonne posted this on January 27th, 2009 @ 11:22pm in Chinese, Reading | Permalink to "Reading Between the Lines"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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What a neat post! Good luck on improving your Chinese. I’m an English-speaker who learned Spanish in high school, and has forgotten all the grammar and most of the vocabulary. Boo!
I’m so ignorant about Chinese… what do the numbers mean after the words in italics? “ri4″ and “dien4″ for example.
It tells you what tone the word has. This is probably worth an entire post in itself, but let me see how much I can explain quickly.
Chinese is a tonal language and the way you say it is part of the word. Take the syllable “fu”. If you say it so the end of the word goes up, like asking—fu?—it means “to hold or steady” and we write it as fu2. But if you say it with heavy emphasis, like you’re yelling at someone angrily—FU!—it means “to pay” and we write it fu4.
I’ll dig up some sound files or video to try to illustrate this in my next post.
As you get more advanced you might wish to track down ‘Cracking Chinese Puzzles’ by T.K.Ann. It is out of print but libraries and used book stores might have stock of it. It comes in either a six book set of around 6000 characters or a single book set of around 4500 characters.
You might have heard of Heisig on alljapaneseallthetime, but personally, I feel that this book is more directly applicable for Chinese – it delves thoroughly into the historical etymology of each character (something not many post-beginner character guides do) and makes use of the phonosemantic similarities underlying the radicals to facilitate learning the pronunciation.
Thanks for the recommendation. I could definitely use a better understanding of the radicals—it would help me start to figure out some characters from context rather than having to dive for a dictionary.