Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (Chinese)

It is true, as pointed out by reader Valerio, that the Chinese script offers no help visually, with no indications of where words are broken up or clustered.

    A consolation for the modern-day learner / reader of Chinese is that he's not having to read Chinese presented the traditional way -- with no punctuation marks, leaving one to rely on, e.g., markers like sentence-final particles (working like full stops).

     Chinese punctuation marks are a borrowing from the Western practice, formally introduced and standardised during the New Culture Movement (which was closely tied to the 1919 May Fourth Movement).

    One finds, down the ages, footnotes by commentators offering their various and varying interpretations of a chunk of classical Chinese text, e.g., 

* Commentator A in Year X would say the text should be broken up at a certain point and parsed as Version.1, 

* Commentator B in Year Y (could be a few hundred years on) would say the same text should be broken up at a different point and parsed as Version 2, 

and so on.  Sometimes the footnotes are longer than the source text.  Luckily, this doesn't happen all the time...

    There is a famous cluster that's often used to illustrate how many variant interpretations there can be to a piece of text with no punctuation.  I shall share it in a separate blog as it's longish.  

    I used to work with someone (John B. at Sino-British Trade Council / SBTC) who'd done his degree in Chinese at Cambridge in the early 70s.  Back then, the Oxbridge degree courses in Chinese only taught classical Chinese.  Like at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), there was an exam at the end of Year One.  If you passed that exam, you were deemed good enough to survive the rigours of the next three years, with no exam until the Final Year.

    The passage for John's Year One exam was the proper style for a classical Chinese text, with no punctuation at all.  The problem, he said, was that it was presented in a square, i.e., with as many characters down as there were across.

    He didn't know if it was to be read:

(i) the traditional way (vertically down, starting with the extreme right hand line, then across the page, vertical line by vertical line);

or 

(ii) the modern way (horizontally, moving from left to right, then down the page, horizontal line by horizontal line, just like a text in the English script).

    He said, "After the exam, I found out that I'd read it the wrong direction -- but I passed anyway!"

    Even with gaps provided between English words, one still needs a certain level of basic knowledge of where to break or cluster within a word for the sense to emerge or to help the learner remember.  An English-equivalent example (cited in blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html) is the word "disappear", where one does need to know how the language behaves so that one doesn't end up breaking it up into "disap" and "pear", on the basis that one knows "pear" does exist as a word.

    So, if you look at it like that, Chinese is not unique (or impossible) after all.  It's just a matter of having a basic set of tools to start with, then building up further strategies based on that knowledge -- and gaining confidence in the process (if not fun as well by treating it as a game).

    I have three Advanced Level private students who've been with me now for 26 years (not continuously) for one of them, and 18 years (not continuously) for the other two.  Over their years with me, they've been drilled so much by my teaching of strategies that they're able to cope with unseen text (no time for prepping beforehand) by applying the Guessology (my coinage) skills I teach them, and arriving at the right analysis a lot of the time.

(From googling)  

Quote 

The New Culture Movement:  an intellectual and cultural reform movement in China, generally active from 1915 to 1921. It aimed to modernize Chinese society by promoting Western science and democracy while rejecting traditional Confucian values, culminating in the political May Fourth Movement of 1919.

The May Fourth Movement:  an intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917–21.

Unquote

Eats shoots and leaves (France)

Colette said, when she told me her mother Jeanette’s cousin Francis and wife Nicole had invited us (Serge, Jeanette and I) over to theirs for dinner, that they were very nice people but loud.  

In the end, for some reason, they came over to the farm house instead, and I cooked a Chinese meal.  

The following day, Colette texted to find out how dinner at the cousin’s house had gone.  In my hurry, I left out a comma in my text back: “Dinner was here and loud dog died.”  

One of the dogs, Mizou, had been bitten in the leg (by a fox??) and been unwell, so she was allowed to spend all her time in the house, given all the juicy scraps, and fed special dishes (mashed potatoes in milk).  In my second and third weeks there, she’d had a couple of fits (like epileptic fits), requiring trips to the vet’s, and died in my final week there.  

Colette was trying to figure out which loud dog it might’ve been that died.  Dino immediately came to mind, being the perpetual woofer (not wwoofer — see Aptly named dog), but he’d been in rude health (naturally, being a rude dog with a dirty habit — see Dino the dirty dog) when she was at the farm the weekend before.  Of course, my text should’ve been, “Dinner was here and loud, dog died.”

(France, September/October 2011)

*For those who don’t know the implications behind my choice of the title “Eats shoots and leaves”: 

(1) The dictionary definition of a panda, among other things, says it “eats shoots and leaves”; 

(2) Inserting a comma after “eats” makes “shoots” and “leaves” verbs instead of nouns, thereby changing the whole perspective altogether.  A comic strip has a panda walking into a bar restaurant, (ordering and) consuming some food, then pulling out a gun, firing into the air and walking out, hence “eats, shoots and leaves”.  

Lynn Truss has written a book about punctuation, with this title, and I think the comic strip might’ve been done just for the book.  Google her if you’re interested in more information about her.

** This is just a word play on woofer and wwoofer.  There's an organisation called WWOOF (used to stand for Weekend Working On Organic Farms in the early 1980s when I first heard about them and was invited by a friend to go with her; it's now called Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms since extending beyond the UK).  The members are called WWOOFers, and people would say they go wwoofing.

Aptly named dog:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/01/aptly-named-dog-france.html

Dino the dirty dog:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/dino-dirty-dog.html