Strategies for learning Chinese characters: 00

 

It is fairly universally held that the Chinese written script is one of the most difficult aspects of the language, if not the most difficult.  This is behind the mainland Chinese government's decision to simplify it, to cut down the illiteracy levels.

    The traditional approach is to knuckle down and commit the images to memory.  If one has to copy them out a hundred times before one can actually remember how to reproduce them, so be it.

    I say "reproduce", because that's usually the more difficult part, having to put down the right combination of strokes onto a blank piece of paper.

    The passive recognition part, at least, gives the reader/student an image to work on.  Whether the analysis ends up being correct or not is another matter, of course.

    This is the focus of this mini series: to try and make passive recognition less of a hit-or-miss exercise, even fun.

    In what way fun?  Fun in devising strategies for remembering, turning it into a game.  Fun in getting it right every time, using those mnemonics, feeling a sense of achievement.  And, of course, extra exercise for the brain in the process, especially for the elderly.  Win win.

    A bit of background here for those who mightn't already have gone through the foundation steps.  Those who have already done so can treat this as revision.

    Chinese characters are generally made up of two components:

* the radical (which gives a clue to the category of the meaning of that character);

* the phonetic (which gives an indication of the pronunciation, although this element is not consistently predictable -- as I keep reminding students, "Rules are never 100% rules.").

    The radical component:  water radical characters are to do with water, whether they are nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives.  For example:

河 hé: (N) river

洗 xǐ: (V) to wash

清 qīng: (adj) clear, (adv) clearly 

濁 (浊) zhuó: (adj) muddy, turbid 

    One can, therefore, at least get closer to what the character is to do with -- "water" in the list above.  Of course, one can't just use this element, one also needs to know the basic grammar to be able to identify if the water-radical character is a verb, a noun, an adjective, or an adverb, before one can hazard an informed guess.  One can't be as random as to try to pin the tail on the donkey with the Chinese language.

    An English equivalent of the radical component in a Chinese character providing a clue to the meaning of the whole would be the suffix -ology:  it's a field of study, it cannot be eaten or worn.

    As I keep saying to students, "If you don't know how to express something precisely, do it in a long-winded way, use baby talk.  Silence = no communication."  So it is with the recognition of the Chinese script.