Comments on: Reading Between the Lines

By: Yvonne

Yvonne — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:45:37 +0000

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.

By: Alvin

Alvin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:35:45 +0000

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.

By: Yvonne

Yvonne — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:55:35 +0000

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.

By: KathyMarie

KathyMarie — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:14:43 +0000

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.