How do people deal with everyday chores without knowing some Mandarin?
I don’t think anyone at my local bank speaks English, and when I want to do anything there are forms to be filled out in Chinese. I can use the internet banking, but that is available in Chinese only.
If I want to book accommodation somewhere, the website is often only in Chinese. My landlord doesn’t speak English and the rental contract is in Chinese. My scooter mechanic doesn’t speak English. The local restaurants don’t have English menus and no one speaks English. If I need some repairs doing, the local plumber-electrician guy doesn’t speak English. I suppose I could get my girlfriend to do everything for me, but she is very busy, and I would prefer to do these things myself.
This is kind of a roundabout question, because those who speak fluent Mandarin are going to tell you it was worth it and those who don’t are going to say ‘Nah, you can get by just fine without it.’
As one of the former, I think you should learn it. Maybe you don’t NEED it in your life, but quality of life-wise it’s much better. Life is easier. Taiwan is a different country when you can understand what everyone around you is saying and talk to them. A language also introduces you to a way of thinking, and when you understand the majority way of thinking life is easier for obvious reasons (things make sense, in whatever twisted way, and you know how to react to situations appropriately). (Maybe I should say ‘method of reasoning’ rather than ‘way of thinking’, but it’s something like that. Language DOES play a large part in how you shape your thoughts, and culture even more so.)
When you can partake in a society 100%, you can enjoy 100% of what the society has to offer. If you can only partake 30 or 40%, then you’re naturally limiting yourself. Some people are OK with that and have a fun life in that 30 or 40% of society. I kind of go mental if I can’t read all the street signs (maybe I’m over-nosy?) so regardless of where I lived, I’d end up fluent in the local lingo pretty quickly - I just wouldn’t consider functioning without it an option.
Mike, no, not to me. Besides, it doesn’t matter what it looks like to you. What matters, in many cases, is what the character looked like at the beginning (e.g. Shang dynasty oracle bones and script on bronzes; not what it looked like well over a millenium later, as in the pic you posted), what the earliest recorded meanings were, and how those two can be connected and made sense of. In other cases, characters don’t resemble what they mean now, and possibly not even back then, because they are being used in the form of phonetic loans, representing a spoken word by way of its sound (and thus are not ideographs). jiu3, ‘nine’ is a case in point; it is pretty clearly a phonetic loan from a depiction of an elbow.
On nǚ nü3 ㄋㄩˇ (also ru3): Shuōwén defines 女 as 婦人也fùrén ‘woman; wife’ (not ‘vagina’). There is no usage in the oracle bones (OB) for ‘vagina’ as far as I know, either. The OB graph is pretty clear in depicting a person kneeling, with hands crossed in front, almost identical to the graph for 母 mǔ ‘mother’, with the latter having the addition of two dots for the breasts, quite obviously a woman, with breasts emphasized; thus, the former is obviously a kneeling woman. There’s a related graph showing the woman holding an infant, as tsukinodeynatsu mentions. There’s no significant disagreement among modern scholars over this. Note that the modern forms of the graphs 母 and 女 are both rotated, as, starting in the clerical version, the hands are at the bottom, resembling legs in 女, while the horizontal stroke in each is the original head-torso-leg line. Such rotation is not uncommon for that period, and has been preserved in numerous modern graphs.
It’s silly to look at a late (e.g. seal script or modern) graph and imagine what it looks like to you, and come up with baseless conjecture. That’s the method behind most of the bullshit folk etymology copied blindly in coffee-table books purporting to explain the Chinese characters. Such books are generally a waste of money.
On ideographs, please read “The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy” (DeFrancis).
[quote=“Dragonbones”]Mike, no, not to me. Besides, it doesn’t matter what it looks like to you. What matters is what the character looked like at the beginning (e.g. Shang dynasty oracle bones and script on bronzes), what the earliest recorded meanings were, and how those two can be connected and made sense of.
On nu:3 (ru3): Shuōwén defines 女 as 婦人也fùrén ‘woman; wife’ (not ‘vagina’). There is no usage in the oracle bones (OB) for ‘vagina’ as far as I know, either. The OB graph is pretty clear in depicting a person kneeling, with hands crossed in front, almost identical to the graph for 母 mǔ ‘mother’, with the latter having the addition of two dots for the breasts, quite obviously a woman, with breasts emphasized; thus, the former is obviously a kneeling woman. There’s a related graph showing the woman holding an infant, as tsukinodeynatsu mentions. There’s no significant disagreement among modern scholars over this. Note that the modern forms of the graphs 母 and 女 are both rotated, as, starting in the clerical version, the hands are at the bottom, resembling legs in 女, while the horizontal stroke in each is the original head-torso-leg line. Such rotation is not uncommon for that period, and has been preserved in numerous modern graphs.
It’s silly to look at a late (e.g. seal script or modern) graph and imagine what it looks like to you, and come up with baseless conjecture. That’s the method behind most of the bullshit folk etymology copied blindly in coffee-table books purporting to explain the Chinese characters. Such books are generally a waste of money.
On ideographs, please read “The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy” (DeFrancis).[/quote]
That book sounds interesting, I’ll check it out! Actually, it was my teacher at Shi-Da who said it was a vagina, so she probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’ll admit when I’m wrong. In retrospect, maybe it was said as a joke…she messed around a lot in class. I googled “女 character vagina” and this thread came up as result number 4…google works fast! I still think the older form looks like a vagina, though.
[quote=“mike029”]That book sounds interesting, I’ll check it out![/quote] Definitely do, it’s a classic!
Most people, including Chinese teachers, and even one particularly unqualified professor of etymology at a major university here, don’t know what they’re talking about; neither do the vast majority of books in English on the topic. You have to do some serious scholarship to discover that, though.
Could be, but I’ve heard examples this bad from a professor, so…
That’s not the oldest form; that’s a late form, from Shuowen (說文解字 Shuōwén Jiézì (Shuo-wen chieh-tzu), often abbreviated Shuōwén). Xŭ Shèn, a high official and scholar in the東漢 Eastern Hàn dynasty (25–220 CE), based his analyses in the Shuōwén chiefly on the structure of the 小篆 xiǎozhuàn, or (small) seal script which, having evolved organically during the mid to late Zhōu dynasty out of the Zhōu script, had then been made the standard by the conquering state of 秦 Qín (Ch’ín) as it unified China (rather than, as blindly parroted by most Chinese teachers and books, being invented upon the conquest).
You need to look up the oracle bone forms to see ‘the old form’.
And I’ll chip in that plenty of scholars over the ages have agreed that certain parts of the 說文解字 are incorrect. The guy was instrumental in the study of characters but, if I remember rightly, he classified quite a few characters incorrectly and a few meanings he appears to have pulled out of his ass, so it’s not the definitive text. You also have to remember he was limited by the discoveries and text at the time as well. (There’s one character which could easily belong to a different group but gets its own group later on in the book - personally I think he forgot to write it in when he wrote the group but wanted to include it, but this explanation was pulled out of my ass. He might have a very good reason for putting it on its own, but nobody’s quite sure what it is!)
There really isn’t a definitive text on 文字學 yet, it’s a very interesting field. There are plenty of very useful texts but you can’t get a semi-correct idea until you’ve read pretty much all of them and been able to cross-compare.
The ‘meaning’ of the characters changes over time to the reader. That why I said it could be almost anything you wanted it to be.
When an ancient scholar says it was definitely a picture of this or that he is actually just choosing the earliest form of the character he could find and then applying a meaning to it at that time, a meaning that is conjecture. Of course this depends on the timepoint chosen more than anything.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]The ‘meaning’ of the characters changes over time to the reader. That why I said it could be almost anything you wanted it to be.
When an ancient scholar says it was definitely a picture of this or that he is actually just choosing the earliest form of the character he could find and then applying a meaning to it at that time, a meaning that is conjecture. Of course this depends on the timepoint chosen more than anything.[/quote]
Although Xu Shen did engage in such conjecture (often wrongly), many of his analyses were based upon the real meanings of that time. Some of the main problems he had were the lack of adequately early materials, and failure to understand how much the basic shapes had changed over time.
Of course, you may assign a shape any ‘meaning’ you want for mnemonic purposes, or try to explain characters such as 好 based on their modern meaning, but that doesn’t change (or clarify, as the case may be) the actual etymology.
The answer can be personalized by asking what else could you do in ten or twelve years. Second, one is learning the language of a people who have a 5000 years history of open animosity toward foreigners(but … Perhaps … maybe that will change).
I am thinking of going to learn mandarin. I have studied from martial arts masters who do not speak English and it would be much better to speak to them in Mandarin.
I think it was worth it to study Mandarin, but there is one thing I regret: I studied Mandarin a bit here and a bit there, with breaks of years between attempts. I wish I had just decided that, yes, I am interested in learning this language, and just gone to Taipei and studied it - either saving enough money to study full-time, or studying 2 hours a day while teaching (which is what I finally did). Piss or get off the pot, as it were.
My biggest regret was not starting into it sooner. I eventually went part-time for a year and then self employed and part-time for another year.
It would have made my life much easier if I had just studied from the start. I self studied for a couple of years but did not get great results from that.
Now I am on a bit of a hiatus from Chinese but it’s all about getting out and talking to people at this stage.
