敖 vs. 敫

So I've had this finished for quite a long time now, I just haven't posted it because I wanted the picture to be better. In the end however, I decided that I didn't care and I'll just post what I've done...which isn't much^^;

So I've always had trouble remembering how to pronounce characters with the graphemes 敖 and 敫. I have never found a good mnemonic device for remembering them. So I took the most used characters and grouped them all together by pronunciation.

Click to enlarge

So that's about it. Just a little helpful chart just as much for you as it is for me. I'll hopefully be writing more soon. I just started a new job so I don't have as much time as before.

Anyways, enjoy!

Etymology of 載

Many Chinese characters are difficult for learners to remember, especially those with many strokes. However, if you learn them properly, i.e., you learn their origins, memorization becomes much simpler.

Today we are looking at 載.

載(zǎi/zài) means "to load" or "to carry", among several other meanings. It is a 形聲, below are its components.

So we can see it is made up of 車(car), its semantic value, and "zāi"(to cut), its phonetic value. We can break "zāi" down even further to see where its origin.

"zāi" is made up of 才(cái) for the phonetic component, and 戈(gē, halberd/spear) for the semantic component.

As we can see 才 has become 十 through the evolution of the characters and scripts. The center character at the top is an authentic scan of 載 from the 說文解字; you can see the top has a 才 and not a 十.

Knowing that at its origin it was a 才 will help you, however, to remember the pronunciation of both of these characters.

Burst of Motivation

So I haven't been very motivated recently. I moved back home to the U.S. and haven't continued much with my Mandarin since then. I have since changed operating systems and have been learning a lot more about GNU/Linux and a bit about programming, so that has kept me busy enough.

I am happy to say that I have found a new source for fun and learning Mandarin, in the shape of an official Final Fantasy game. That's right, this time it's an official translation, not a fan translation.

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I have the first in this series, and am really looking forward to playing this one in Chinese as well. The only problem is finding a way to get it. I could buy it here, Dissidia 012 (Chinese version), which seems to be the only place I can find to buy it, but alas, I have no money.

If anyone knows a place where I can get it, most likely 下載ing it, please let me know. I am still looking, but I haven't had much luck as of yet.

I may add a Paypal link if anyone would like to donate for this, for Mandarin books, or for anything you wish the money to do go, but I doubt anyone would donate to begin with. I'll think it over.

寧→宁

Here is a character that I initially had trouble remembering, but after learning its etymology I have never forgotten it.



This beautiful character is a 會意.


For fun let's look at 小篆 version. (These are real versions of the characters scanned from the 說文解字 if I'm not mistaken, except for 宀 because I couldn't be arsed to crop it out of a normal character)


So what does all of this mean? 宀 means roof, 心 means heart, 皿 means plate, 丂 here is something like 示(alter). Over time the 丂 changed to 丁. So where heart in is the home (under the roof), and where food is on the table/alter is where it is peaceful or serene. And that is the meaning of this character, serenity, peace; peaceful.

It makes perfect sense.

Now let's take a look at the simplified version of this character.


So all of the meaning has been stripped from this 會意, and it remains nothing more than 2 graphemes, one on top of the other. One could go so far as to say that it is now a 形聲, however, the fact that 丁 rhymes with 寧 is a lucky coincidence and no dictionary would call it so.


So while you do remove 9 strokes, you also remove the meaning of the character. If you are THAT worried about the number of strokes, then why not remove the Chinese characters altogether and make the written language an alphabet?

Explaining how easy Chinese is to others pt.2

Spoken Chinese

Ok, so you've seen how a sound in Mandarin (and other Chinese languages) can mean many things. You have also seen how when written there is no confusion as to the meaning of each sound. However, how does this all work when you're speaking? Surely native speakers don't draw each syllable that is not understood and show it to the listener.

In Ancient Chinese and/or Classical Chinese monosyllabic words were no problem. There were enough sounds for the amount of words that they had in existence. However, with time and evolution the number of possible sounds (in Mandarin at least) came down to about 400. With tones this brings us to approximately 1600 distinct sounds, (English has many more than this, thus most words are easily distinguished from one another).

Let's take a look at how Sinophones have overcome this hindrance.


The answer is simple: bisyllabism, i.e. using two syllables for one word.※ Two morphemes with either identical or similar meanings are used to create a word, whether it be a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc. With two syllables the chances misunderstanding a word are much lower.

例子 Examples

事情
(thing, affair, matter)
=
事(thing, affair, matter)
+
情(emotion, situation)

There are literally hundreds of "shì"s in Mandarin (not to mention the hundreds of others that have different tones). Yet 事 is still used in its monosyllabic form. However, to distinguish it from the countless others this bisyllabic form is used and is the only word in Mandarin with the pronunciation "shì qíng".

驚訝
(astonished)
=
驚(to startle/frighten; to be startled/frightened)
+
訝(to be surprised)

Not only are synonyms used, but descriptive characters are also used.

視窗
(window)
=
視(to look at)
+
窗(window)

There are several words that are pronounced "chuāng", however there is only one "shì chuāng".



I just realized I had planned on writing this for people who are not (yet) learning Mandarin, but I ended up writing it toward those who are learning the language. I didn't focus on "easy to understand" either... oops, my bad.



※There are other methods used to do this, but I am focusing on the most common. Another common method is adding a nominalizer, e.g. 子、頭、阿. While 孩 may be ambiguous if used alone, 孩子 is always understood. Same with 木/木頭 and 姨/阿姨.

Sorry for the lack of posts

Hey guys, I'm sorry for the lack of content on the blog. I moved back to the United States about two and a half weeks ago, so I'm still getting settled in. I'll try start posting again very soon. I may try to finish the second part of my last post today. I hope I still have followers :P

Explaining how easy Chinese is to others pt.1

Written Chinese

The written Chinese language is very intimidating and/or confusing to most who do not know how it actually works. Here is a very brief explanation of how Chinese characters are a very efficient and easy system, arguably easier than languages that use the Roman alphabet.

Over 97% of all Chinese characters have only 2 parts, a meaning part and a pronunciation. When looking at a character that you don't know, you can use these parts to know a lot more about it.

Imaginary example

Let's pretend that the words "maple", "mother", "river", "hate", "silver", "shout", "grab", and "leg" are all pronounced "foo" in an imaginary language. They are all homonyms. However, when written each one has a little note next to it giving you a hint to its meaning.

Maple = wood-foo
Mother = woman-foo
River = water-foo
Hate = emotion-foo
Silver = metal-foo
Shout = sound-foo
Grab = hand-foo
Leg = bodypart-foo

This is essentially how Chinese works. Each character has a specific sound, which is given to us by a specific group of strokes that is known to the reader. In addition, there are 214 standard meaning parts which give us hints to characters' meanings.

Real-life example

The phonetic part 辟 (bì). I'm going to ignore the tone for now, but just know that all of characters that follow are pronounced the same way and with the same tone.

(Click to enlarge)

This phenomenon is much like suffixes in the English language, except that it is only used in the written language. Imagine if almost all words in the English language used a list of standard suffixes.