language schools like Shida and TLI spend most of their class time on conversation. Students are expected to memorize hanzi at home, on their own, and by rote, without really understanding the relationship between the character and its meaning. But wouldn’t hanzi be easier to memorize, and more interesting too, if language schools presented characters in some kind of etymological context?
“This is the character for ‘pang4.’ As you can see, the phonetic component looks like ‘ban4’ but by adding the flesh radical we get the character for ‘fat.’”
I would love a class like this. Anyone know of schools or books that present characters this way? Am I the only one who would be interested?
[quote=“beautifulspam”]language schools like Shi-Da and TLI spend most of their class time on conversation. Students are expected to memorize hanzi at home, on their own, and by rote, without really understanding the relationship between the character and its meaning. But wouldn’t hanzi be easier to memorize, and more interesting too, if language schools presented characters in some kind of etymological context?
“This is the character for ‘pang4.’ As you can see, the phonetic component looks like ‘ban4’ but by adding the flesh radical we get the character for ‘fat.’”
I would love a class like this. Anyone know of schools or books that present characters this way? Am I the only one who would be interested?[/quote]
As Dragonbones will attest, there’s a difference between folk etymology and true etymology. Often the folk etymology and other mnemonics are more useful for remembering characters, but the danger is becoming convinced that these are true etymologies. For example, 船 is sometimes remembered as “boat-eight-mouth” (eight humans on Noah’s ark", but it’s not an etymology.
For now, all the English-language books on this suffer from a mixture of real and folk etymology. If all you want is some quick idea of what the phonetic and semantic element in a character is, and what characters share that element, you might try Harbaugh, Rick (1998). Chinese Characters: a Genealogy and Dictionary 中文字譜 - 漢英字元字典, Zhongwen.com publ., ISBN 0-9660750-0-5. About NT$400 a few years ago when I got mine.
Its etymologies are highly suspect, but the graphic organization of the book, using innovative genealogical charts (family trees of characters), makes it easier to identify the role that 半 ban4 plays in various characters like 胖 pang4. Looking up pang4, we find 胖 in the index, with a numerical code of 92 - 8 by it. Flipping through the book, you find a family tree numbered 92 which contains 牛 leading to 半, 牧 and other ‘children’. Under 半 you find its ‘children’, 伴 拌 絆 (all ban4), 判 and 叛 (both pan4), and 胖 pang4. So far so good, and if this is helpful to you, I’d buy it.
When you then look to the descriptions of the etymology of each character, Harbaugh generally identifies the semantic vs. phonetic breakdown fairly well (with some errors), but it’s the mnemonic description he gives which is most often suspect. For example, he might say that 伴 represents a person’s other half (ergo “companion”), whereas 半 probably plays a purely phonetic role here.
If you learn to take the menmonics with a very large grain of salt, Harbaugh’s book is useful.
What is really needed is a boot camp course in bushou ['radicals] and the other elements that make up characters.
Memorize the names of the eight strokes.
Memorize the folk names and readings of all the bushou.
Learn common phonetic elements
Exercises at identifying and breaking down characters into their constituent components.
Once you have this stuff down, you won’t need etymologies. You will understand the logic of the characters and therefore be able to memorize them much more quickly without artificial props.
I think students should also spend a lot of time being drilled on how to write characters as described orally. Gong1chang2zhang1->張 etc.
Not sure how far along you are in your studies, but have you tried the yellow or orange copies of 250 Essential Chinese Characters? Those have some of that information. You can get them at Eslite.
I’d like to see a collection of the morphologies just as they are relevant today for the person with no real interest in the history of the Chinese language or with the character system. Orgy = Xingpaidui/ sex line up is a good if somewhat coarse example of what I mean.
bob, if what you mean is just mnemonics, without regard to real etymology, then books like Harbaugh’s (above), or the Peng ‘Fun With Chinese Characters’ series should be just fine. There are now various similar works out there.
Thanks DB. I would like to find something that showed the actual meanings of “words” so that I can have a chance of recognizing and remembering them correctly later. Chang3 for factory showed up again in nong2chang3 (agriculture factory) for example and I believe chang3 is part of the unit that make up “engineer” and “process” as well. That kind of thing really helps and I can feel a real ache for that kind of breakdown of words whenever I learn one that is more than one syllable. I understand that sometimes the breakdown makes sense and the units can be transfered logically and sometimes not. What I am saying is that I’d love a book that just showed the ones that are sensible today.
By the way I am continuing with my “don’t learn a single character” approach to studying Chinese.
bob, I like your example, although I think you got the tones wrong. Orgy = xing4 pai4dui4 (sex party) whereas sex lineup=xing4 pai2dui4. Sure the difference is minor, but I would hate to see you lining up when you could be joining in. Maybe you can convince DB to write an “after hours” version of his dictionary.
[quote]
Not sure how far along you are in your studies, but have you tried the yellow or orange copies of 250 Essential Chinese Characters? Those have some of that information. You can get them at Eslite. [/quote]
Yes, they were a great help two years ago! Now I am looking for something more advanced
If you’re not in taipei, Caves also has them.
For anyone who doesn’t know, these books present 500 basic chinese characters organised according to their component parts, with funny little cartoons and extremely far-fetched stories about how each character came to be written in its modern form.
Before I read those books, hanzi were random squiggles. After I read them and completed the exercises, I felt like i was really “seeing” them for the first time as part of a rational system. Highly recommended. DB’s warning about folk etymology is well advised. Some of the etymologies offered in this book are so odd that they strain credibility even for a raw beginner.
Feiren wrote:
[quote]What is really needed is a boot camp course in bushou ['radicals] and the other elements that make up characters.
Memorize the names of the eight strokes.
Memorize the folk names and readings of all the bushou.
Learn common phonetic elements
Exercises at identifying and breaking down characters into their constituent components.
Once you have this stuff down, you won’t need etymologies. You will understand the logic of the characters and therefore be able to memorize them much more quickly without artificial props. [/quote]
Actually I think you ahve described exactly what I am looking for. I said “etymology” but maybe “morphology” would be more accurate. I don’t care at this stage to take all my characters back to adam, I just want to see them as part of a system.
Precisely. There is a systematic logic to the characters that can be studied in isolation from their historical logic. The latter is an enormously interesting field in and of itself, but it is of limited pedagogical value.
There are a number of books out like that. Most are similarly limited in the number of characters they cover, and tend to cover a mostly overlapping set of easily ‘explainable’ stories like 家, 好, and 字, so I’m not sure how valuable it is to go buying more such books. There are none I know of which cover either the folk etymology or the morphology, as you put it, of a much larger set of characters, except for Harbaugh, which despite its pocketbook size, covers about 4000 graphs (according to the rear cover blurb).
Then for now, beginning with something like the cartoon books and adding Harbaugh is a good start. Give me 5 years and perhaps I’ll have something organized and etymologically accurate to add to the list.
You can also do a little detective work of your own. When you see a new character, say 便 pian2 in pian2yi2 ‘inexpensive’, you can ask yourself what the components are, and look them up using the bushou index in a good dictionary, discovering in this case that the right side 更 is geng1 ‘change’, also geng4 ‘even more’. Then you can make a note in the margin of your dictionary at 更 saying "in 便 pian2/bian4’, and another at 便 saying “人 + 更 geng1/geng4”.
Over time, your dictionary will accumulate a very useful set of margin notes which will be of help in tracking down characters you’ve forgotten as well as in learning the systematic relationships (and spurious similarities) between the graphs.
So there is actually a distinction between zi4 and ci2 with zi4 being used to indicate the characters within a word ci2? I did not know that despite learning the zi4 ci2 thing a dozen times from Taiwanese people. I am guessing that the two words are probably used pretty loosely except when referring to components within a compound, or am I flapping it in the breeze yet again?
Anyway I went back and looked at the factory, engineer, process problem again and what I discovered was that the gong1 in gong1chang3 (factory) and the gong1 in gong1cheng2 (engineer) both mean work. This I was a ble to deduce because the squiggle for work is quite easy. I am unable however to determine whether or not there is any relationship btwn the cheng2 in guo4cheng2 (process) and the cheng2 in gong1cheng2 (engineer) because none of the squiggles for cheng2 are in any way distinguishable from each other, at least not in the Far East Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary, and there are a few different meanings given for cheng2 that might reasonably be used to form the words process or engineer.
Bloody hell.
What I would really like is a system for studying that was based totally on Pinyin, as though the character system didn’t exist, essentially. If that meant that there was a large number of homonyms then so be it. The sound and the spelling is all I know of the language anyway.
I am constantly frustrated trying to ask in English whether or not something I just learned in Chinese is the same phonetic (I’d call it spelling but the idea that a Chinese word would have a spelling tends to blow their fuses - not that phonetic works any better) as another word but a different tone.
For example I’d like to be able to say in Chinese “Oh, so the gong in gong1chang3 (factory) is a different tone from the gong in gong4chan3 zhu3yi4 (communism). My isn’t that counter intuitive?”
Or perhaps just “Are these two ‘words’ the same sound/phonetic/spelling (whichever will work) and a different tone?”
Yeah, what did you think the distinction was?! Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh.
Single-character words are usually referred to as zi4. Multiple-character words are ci2, and their constituent characters are zi4. So to keep it simple, you can think of zi4 as single characters (when they stand alone, as well as when they are the building blocks of compound words), while ci2 are the compound words (terms made up of 2+ zi4).
Pedantic, hair-splitting arguments from more advanced posters on zi4 vs. ci2 will probably not be helpful here.
In the ci2 (辭 aka 詞 compound word) “guo4cheng2”, the zi4 (字, characters) are 過程; in gong1cheng2, the characters are 工程. The cheng2 character is identical in both compounds, and the meanings are likely related, yes. Not sure why this is problematic for you. I think you’re discovering some meaningful relationships here, and I would just like to say JIAYOU!!!
Maybe you can convince DB to write an “after hours” version of his dictionary.
Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh.
