Chinese Lesson 2: What's In A Word

When Ju was born we gave him a Chinese name. Daniel asked me to teach him how to write it and I tried to. Of course the exercise was a disaster, he never mastered the "correct" way of writing the strokes (left to right, top to bottom!) and his characters came out looking like squiggles made by a 5 year old.

Chinese isn't easy, I admit, and it took me the requisite 12 years of formal education plus 3 in kindergarten to learn how to read, write and converse at a level where I can claim some proficiency in the language. The difference between Chinese and languages like English and German that use the roman letters is we have to memorise every character and there must be thousands. In Singapore, the system aims to get a child to memorise 2000 words by the time they finish high school, which is a total of 10 years! That would get you to a minimum level of proficiency but the journey is painful, as anybody who has had to learn it this slow, hard way would tell you.

So I've given it some thought, how I am going to teach Ju my language, when it's so memory-intensive and requires a total immersion in character-recognition and not only conversation. If you go right down to the basics, there IS a schematic to Chinese. I'm not qualified to teach it or give a history of our pictograms, but I will just give a very simple introduction to the written form.

 Chinese is quite lyrical, with 4 tones to each word (or character) and a neutral for a few. Each character consists of radicals (like words consist of letters). Radicals consist of strokes, starting from the most basic single stroke (see above, 1) to the most complicated 17 strokes which is in itself a character.

If you look at the radical, yi (meaning "one"), it looks like a little line. You write it in one stroke, from left to right, and that's pretty much why it's a 1-stoke radical.  Look at the radical, er (meaning "two) and voila, it's two lines, hence a 2-stroke radical. You think: no-brainer, this is easy!  Except it gets more complicated.

Each radical, be it a simple 3-stroke one or a mother of a 15 stroke word, pairs with other radicals to form the Chinese characters. This means radicals can be characters by themselves too. Look at the above diagram, you will see the 3-stroke radical kou, also the word for "mouth". Well, kou makes tons of other words (see below). The list is not exhaustive, I am only showing you kou paired with words with 2 and 3 other strokes:

I don't recognise all the words, as a few are rarely used in daily life. Most are commonly seen words, like 吃 (chi, meaning to eat) and 吓 (xia, meaning to frighten or scare). 

But you get the picture. Incidentally, it's no coincidence that 吃 and 吓 involve the mouth (eat and frighten) in some way, and therein lies the logic of the radical 口 kou. This is also how you can recall how to write characters in Chinese.

In closing, hanyu pinyin is the system of romanising the Chinese characters. For example, xia tells you exactly how to pronounce 吓 (I'll deal with pinyin in another post). The accent on the "a" tells you which tone to use, in this case, the 4th. There is also a system to where you put the various accents, of course, and they are always on a vowel if you look at the first and second tables.

It is also when you know how to break down a character into its component radicals that you wouls be able to use a Chinese dictionary.