Well he should’ve a) had a point, and b) made it.
Yeah, not sure why you got so angry at the guy, but if he had a point I guess we’ll never know now.
It wasn’t like he called anyone stupid or otherwise threw insults around, and you know, you hyper-fluent types aren’t the only ones who frequent this board. There are lots of people taking baby steps that check this board out as well, who would welcome any discourse on the ins and outs of learning this often frustrating and enigmatic language.
[quote=“FearsomeOrange”]…There are lots of people taking baby steps that check this board out as well, who would welcome any discourse on the ins and outs of learning this often frustrating and enigmatic language.[/quote]I think that it is especially important that those taking their baby steps in Chinese (such as me) are guided by those who have taken the same path before (or who have an extremely good understanding of it) and who have a good knowledge of theoretical issues of the language.
I feel it’s the same when people learn a musical instrument. It is sometimes said that beginners don’t need a very good quality instrument, and that they can be taught by someone who has only a modest amount of experience and skill. While it’s true that some beginners manage to make remarkable progress despite this regime, what would help them much more would be to have a good-quality instrument and an excellent teacher in the first place.
Ultimately everybody wants to make efficient, encouraging progress, whether they’re learning a language or a musical instrument. Learning from those who really possess the necessary linguistic and pedagogical knowledge and skills is the way to do this.
Fair enough. However, I would certainly be turned off from learning anything if my teacher were so close-minded as to not allow anyone else’s opinion to be discussed in a civil manner. Any teacher who believes that he has all the answers isn’t much of a teacher, in my opinion.
I didn’t learn anything from watching Tetsuo slam this guy into the ground, for instance. Except, maybe, not to post much in this forum for fear of his wrath.
The response to this guy seemed almost Sinophobic. How dare a Chinese person invite us to learn his views on his own language.
He may have been a bit pretentious, but that’s hardly something new around here.
Did I accidentally stumble into the IP forum again?
[quote=“FearsomeOrange”]Fair enough. However, I would certainly be turned off from learning anything if my teacher were so close-minded as to not allow anyone else’s opinion to be discussed in a civil manner. Any teacher who believes that he has all the answers isn’t much of a teacher, in my opinion.
I didn’t learn anything from watching Tetsuo slam this guy into the ground, for instance. Except, maybe, not to post much in this forum for fear of his wrath.[/quote]Nobody disagreed with the OP’s opinion that there is an ideographic element to Chinese characters. The disagreement was about the over-simplistic pedagogical conclusions that he/she seemed to derive from this.
I would not have phrased things the way that Tetsuo did. But there certainly has to be a place for reasoned debate.
[quote=“Sam Vimes”]The response to this guy seemed almost Sinophobic. How dare a Chinese person invite us to learn his views on his own language.[/quote]What a strange conclusion to make. Isn’t it obvious that Ironlady and Tetsuo have learned what they know from the best scholars in the field, of “Chinese” or whatever origin?
Well, if you want to call Tetsuo and his “not the sharpest tool in the box” retorts as being reasoned I guess no one can stop you.
No one argues that Tetsuo obviously has the knowledge. Manners though, may be another thing altogether. I would have loved to hear a more reasoned discussion on the OPs ideas, whether they were/are erroneous or not and why. All we got was a tempest in a teapot from Tetsuo (aaaah, alliteration), showing off how much he knows, without helping anyone here with their own learning. This IS the Learning Chinese portion of Forumosa, isn’t it?
Well, I agree that Tetsuo’s response might have been a bit extreme given the lack of provocation.
The OP’s problem, IMHO, is that he’s trying to sell a patent medicine. This will come across as over-simplified and ethnocentric or something, but most native Chinese speakers I know fall into one of three categories. One group doesn’t care anything about teaching Chinese, knows nothing about it, and just casually explains things if asked. The second group have an actual background in Chinese linguistics, Chinese language teaching, or a similar field, and obviously can explain things. The third group has no background in anything in particular, but has come up with “theories” of their own which they feel are universally applicable to foreigners learning Chinese. They mean well in most cases, but the concepts don’t seem to communicate well. The OP probably falls into this group. The awkwardness of his English unfortunately contributes to his difficulty in explaining what he really means to say, but the basic backlash probably resulted because insofar as anyone can tell, he isn’t saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times before.
I let the thread run hoping that someone would contribute something useful, which doesn’t seem to have happened yet…well, we’ll see.
Okay, I don’t know what that guy was going to say. But here’s a rough explanation of where he was probably going, and some personal opinions (on the internet? personal opinions? gee…) YMMV.
If you’ve been studying for more than a month or so with any decent teacher, you’ve probably been told that characters aren’t just completely unique sets of squiggles, a new arbitrary set of lines for each one. Instead they’re made up of smaller components, which in many cases have associated meanings: like 竹 zhu2 means bamboo, 口 kou3 is a mouth, 豆 dou4 means beans or legumes, etc. The common ones, you’ll probably learn. The less common ones, eg. 耒 lei3, a plow, you’ll probably never encounter by themselves, though you’ll probably notice the repeated pattern of strokes. This gives rise to the idea of characters having “radicals” or a radical and a phonetic in some cases: part of the character is “spelled out” or composed of symbols with individual meanings, giving you some idea of the overall meaning.
So the poster was then going to say that if you know the meaning of the components, this can help you.
Can it? Yes and no.
Sure, it’s a great bit of information to have – when it comes to helping you learn characters (as you’re seeing patterns that you recognize and can ‘chunk’ without having to think stroke-by-stroke). But for actually, functionally reading anything, it is of almost no use.
Bold statement, eh? I’ll step back a little bit: knowing the components of a character can help you figure out the general realm of meaning, in some cases. For instance, 耒 that I mentioned above shows up in two characters 耕geng1 and 耘 yun2 (and others, these are just two examples). 耕 is made up of “to plow” and 井 “a well”. So what does that mean? To dig a well? Plow a well? Irrigate a field? Well, it actually just means to till or to plow; the ‘well’ part is (I’m guessing) a reference to a design for agricultural fields that was shaped like a well (the “well-field system” that Mencius was always blathering about) – but you wouldn’t know that was what it meant unless you already knew the character meaning. 耘 is a related word that means “to weed”; that 云 yun2 means ‘to say’ (it was used in classical Chinese as the verb ‘to say’ but indicating an indirect quotation, so “said that:” instead of “said:” if you get my meaning) and its role in this character is purely phonetic. Or, you know, you could guess that it means “talk about plowing,” but that’d be pretty far off.
The 耒 element here is part of a visual system, yes, but all it tells you is the general realm of meaning, and if you’re trying to actually read something, that just isn’t good enough. Unless you want to read “eh, something about field work, and then maybe some crops grew, and this part says there was a king who did something…”
Not that it’s useless knowledge – it’s excellent knowledge for mnemonic purposes, but it certainly isn’t a ‘spelling’ or some such.
So far it sounds like what he’s talking about is at least marginally useful… maybe… Let’s try a different example: 篤 du3 meaning sincere. This is made up of 竹 zhu2, the aforementioned bamboo, and 馬 ma3, a horse. “Bamboo horse”? What is that?? Obviously the characters here don’t have a lot to do with the meaning (well, I think horses are associated with sincerity maybe?? that’s a guess); the bamboo part is purely phonetic. Useful mnemonic, not that useful for reading though – or even to remind you of what the character is as you’re reading it, because you cannot rely on this and read at speed.
Speaking of reading. I’ve written the above argument as though you’re going to sit down, read a book, and try to figure out meanings for characters you haven’t seen before. And (here’s the important part) the OP’s focus on “reading instead of chat” – ie, you’re trying to interpret the symbols when you don’t know the words – indicates that he wasn’t talking about helping you learn the characters for an actual vocabulary, but for trying to read characters when you don’t know what pronunciation is associated and what the meaning is that goes with that pronunciation. This will not work. In fact, if you can’t pronounce those characters (and to have even a remote guess at them, you’d need to see the phonetic elements), you will either skip over them or start making up pronunciations of your own. It’s just the way the brain works. If you are reading something, you will be interpreting pronunciations in your head as well. That’s what separates writing from pictures. So this sort of thing could actually be harmful, if you’re teaching yourself things that aren’t true; in any event it will not help your reading.
So the OP’s point boils down to “there are elements with some individual meaning that reappear in characters, and you can explain a lot of them based on the elements in them.” Any decent teacher or book about Chinese characters will tell you that much. I don’t want to minimize the importance of this for memorization purposes, at first, when you’re still learning the character, but you still need to learn it by heart rather than figuring out the meaning based on the elements in it, and heaven help you if you try to “figure out” a character without looking it up. The guy did have a point in that sense, and maybe you really haven’t heard this, but if so I’m rather surprised. (For more about this kind of ‘character etymology’ see www.zhongwen.com and the associated book, the etymologies are ‘pop’ and in some cases flat-out wrong (or so I’m told) but again they’re useful for memorization aids if that’s what you use them for. If you’re looking for serious etymological research, ask Dragonbones, not me; there was a thread about oracle bones recently that talked about it.)
The OP was also mentioning that characters can be read in different languages; they’ll be pronounced differently but the meaning would be clear. This is actually because both languages have agreed to use the same symbols for writing, even though a lot of the sound-meaning of characters is lost when you do that. So, basically no language but Chinese is actually written exclusively in Chinese; look at modern Japanese and Korean, you’ll be able to get a snippet here or there if you know the right characters but way too much needed information is written out in phonetic symbols. That’s why I made the point I did earlier – when, say, the Japanese could all read classical Chinese texts despite language differences, it was because they were actually reading and writing classical Chinese, or a version of it, kinda like European medievals writing in Latin (and naturally preserving the Latin sound-information in the words, since they were after all writing Latin words and not their own language ‘in Latin characters’) – they just all had to learn Latin first. Don’t need to spend much time on that.
Ironlady, I hope this could be considered as bringing the information content of the thread up at least somewhat, but I wouldn’t presume… 
And sorry for the long and not-terribly-clearly-worded post, all, it’s way too late for me… ready to be shot down…
I’d love to leave it just at that, but:
It is amazing how much anger and violent replies telling a native Taiwanese or Chinese person this invokes… Every word of every language has meaning and a reason it “looks” the way it does, character, roman letter, squiggle or drool based whatever. Knowing this does not necessarily allow the reader to understand it’s meaning.
I’m also amused by the ad hoc arguments and nature my various mandarin professors (many schooled in etymology) use to explain why “every native speaker knows X character means Y, its blatantly obvious just by looking at it…” And every explanation is different…
Can some characters be understood by looking at component parts? Yes. Most? Hell no.
I, for one, feel edified.
As do I. Thanks for that great post.