Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
User avatar
Zegpoddle
Yellow Belt
Posts: 54
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 5:29 am
Location: Shanghai
Languages: English (N), rusty French and German (formerly B2 in each), Russian (beginner), Mandarin Chinese (A2/HSK3)
x 221

Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby Zegpoddle » Wed Oct 10, 2018 3:23 am

For those of you with experience trying to learn written Chinese:

What resources do you find most useful in analyzing characters into their constituents to make them easier to learn and remember?

I’m currently using two websites and a number of books for this purpose:

https://characterpop.com/characters
https://dictionary.writtenchinese.com/
Picture Chinese: Art as Language by Sukming Lo (ISBN 1592650694 or 9781592650699)
Fun with Chinese Characters, Vol. 1-3 by Tan Huay Peng (ISBN 981013004X, 9810130058, and 9810130066)

The problem I’m running into is that these sources often contradict each other when explaining the composition and etymology of characters. To take just a couple of examples:

(1) Lo claims that the character for the Mandarin/Pǔtōnghuà word (meaning “go” or “leave”) consists of a person (top part) walking away from a place (bottom part), but Peng claims that it is a pictograph of “an empty vessel and its cover. The meaning go comes from the removal of the cover and contents of the vessel.”

(2) WrittenChinese.com dissects the character for Mandarin (meaning “drink”) into mouth + sun + beggar, but CharacterPop.com says it is composed of opening + why/how and further analyzes why/how into sun + wrap + person.

These are just two of many, many examples I could provide. Different sources are often wildly inconsistent in explaining what parts a character is made of and how those parts play a role in determining the character’s meaning.

Why do explanations of characters vary so widely? Is it just a case of some authors taking care to distinguish phonetic from meaning components while others don’t? Or is the evolution of the meaning of Chinese characters so shrouded in history that etymologies are really just educated guesses? Or is Chinese so wildly polysemic that nailing down the meanings of characters with any definiteness is a fool’s errand?

And do the contradictions even matter? My purpose in researching the background of each character is to help me remember it, usually by creating a little sentence or story out of the components, such as “under a hot sun, your mouth begs to drink something.” It’s just a private mnemonic to help me remember how to write all the parts of the character when I hear the word. Eventually the mnemonic fades away and I just “know” how to write the character for without having to recall the sentence, which is my goal. But when I am in the early stage of learning a new character, I can’t remember it without concocting a little story-sentence for it, and to do that, I prefer to stick as closely as possible to the actual meaning of the radical and phonetic component used in that character. (To be honest, the phonetic component doesn’t help a beginner like me at all because I usually don’t know the other word that the phonetic is referring to.) In other words, every time I notice that a character contains the radical for “moon” or “eye,” I try to incorporate those concepts into my mnemonic sentence, sometimes to the breaking point of complete absurdity.

Should I not be worrying about discrepancies in different sources’ explanations of what each character is composed of, and just choose the explanation that makes it easiest for me to construct a mnemonic? That’s what I’ve been doing so far, but I’m wondering if it will hurt me down the road–-in other words, whether accepting the “wrong” analysis of a character will force me to have to revise my understanding of that character and all the others that are related to it later on. I don’t want to be seeing beggars where there are only people wrapped in (or wrapping?) something and realize at some future date that I should have gone with wrap + people and not beggar because the latter really has no relation at all to the meaning or sense of that character. I want to make the right choice from beginning--if the idea of right choice even has any validity or practicality in this situation–-but that’s hard to do when different sources give such conflicting explanations of why characters have certain components in them.

Which sources do you trust to provide a reliable analysis of each character–-or do you not bother to look up this information at all (and if not, why not)?
5 x
Graciously begging our alien overlords to remember to refresh the batteries regularly in their toddler’s cosmic Game Boy on which the simulation that is my life is running ;)

User avatar
Axon
Blue Belt
Posts: 775
Joined: Thu Jun 16, 2016 12:29 am
Location: California
Languages: Native English, in order of comfort: Mandarin, German, Indonesian,
Spanish, French, Russian,
Cantonese, Vietnamese, Polish.
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5086
x 3288

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby Axon » Wed Oct 10, 2018 4:20 am

I generally use Wiktionary or Hanzicraft - which are likely to provide different definitions from the ones you have!

I'm only an armchair Sinologist, but from what I've read, it is very much a problem of scholars classifying the character by different radicals. Victor Mair over on Language Log likes to complain about this a lot.

As for mnemonics, I never tended to make any that stuck in my head except for a handful of very basic characters at the very beginning. I know the meanings of all the common radicals and I have a high tolerance for ambiguity, so seeing that 筑 contains "bamboo" and "work" makes perfect sense to me that it would mean "to build, construct." I don't so much as link the components to a story as say "well, this character has a particular semantic meaning and some of its components are in that same semantic field." The memory link is further reinforced when I read or write that character later.

喝 is actually one that I used a completely unrelated mnemonic for way back when - if I squint, it kinda looks like a guy with a bow tie lifting a glass to drink. But I buy the CharacterPop definition: an old or rare character with a related pronunciation is repurposed with a mouth radical to signify that it's semantically related to the mouth.

I haven't used it myself, but a bunch of experts in Chinese learning enthusiastically recommend Outlier Linguistics' dictionary. It's supposedly the real deal of etymologies, clearing up a lot of myths that have been propagated by other dictionary writers. The videos and the blog posts are phenomenal.

Anyway, it all comes with time. After you memorize a couple of hundred characters you'll find that they start to come easier and easier. Especially when it comes to phonetic components, especially if you end up getting interested in other Chinese languages and other uses of the Chinese writing system. When Vietnamese people started using Chinese characters to write Vietnamese, they made up a ton of characters whose phonetic components are clear as day. The word for "west" in Vietnamese is tây. The word "hand" is "tay." What's the character for "hand"? 西+手. Phonetic plus semantic. You don't need a story for that.
Last edited by Axon on Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
5 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23128
Contact:

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby rdearman » Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:01 am

Zegpoddle wrote:Which sources do you trust to provide a reliable analysis of each character–-or do you not bother to look up this information at all (and if not, why not)?

I don't bother myself. I just do brute force memorisation. These character analysis things always seemed a bit silly, and trying to remember via mnemonics thousands upon thousands of characters doesn't seem very efficient to me. So I just put things in an anki deck and review them again and again. Also a tip I got from Smallwhite (another forum member) was to create a spreadsheet with 10 blocks (like you see for character practice) then greyscale the character on 7 of the 10 and copy over them, then free hand in the other 3 blocks. Constant repetition and writing should get you further than mnemonics, and will help your handwriting. However, I'm a beginner, so take this advice with a grain of salt. But you asked if I bothered to look up character analysis and basically it is a no from me.

I put a sample here if you want to look at the spreadsheetfor writing practice anyway. It is HSK Level 1 characters.
EDIT: This is a modified version of Smallwhite's idea, but you can see the point. You just print it out and practice writing over the greyscale ones.
5 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
Querneus
Blue Belt
Posts: 836
Joined: Thu Dec 01, 2016 5:28 am
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Languages: Speaks: Spanish (N), English
Studying: Latin, French, Mandarin
x 2269

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby Querneus » Wed Oct 10, 2018 10:49 am

Once you know hundreds of characters, you quickly get to recognize on your own whether a component is being used phonetically or not with fair accuracy. There's no need to learn a story for each of 清 qing1, 情 qing2, 晴 qing2 and 請 qing3 once you realize that the right part, 青 qing1, is being used phonetically (all five characters in this example are very commonly used). The use of components in a phonetic way is very common, which reduces the difficulty of learning characters significantly.

For characters that for some reason I have a hard time remembering, like the character 顯 xian3 of 顯示 xian3shi4 'to show, make clear' and 明顯 ming2xian3 'obvious, clear', which I noticed I often struggled with, I usually just make sure to remember the components as a sequence. So I remember it as 日 ri4 'sun' + 糸 mi4 'silk' + 糸 + 頁 ye4 'page (as in "webpage")', which in my mind I sound out as "ri4-silk-silk-ye4". (㬎 xian3 *is* sort of a phonetic component by itself--it's how 顯 used to be written in archaic Chinese as it was only later that 頁 got added to its right-hand side--, but it's extremely rarely used in characters other than 顯!)

There will still be some difficult characters, mostly because they use components used in only or almost only that very word you're trying to learn. Consider this little bit from the infamous rant against Chinese characters on pinyin.info ("Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard"):

    I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

The right-hand side part of 嚔 ti4, 疐 zhi4, is a phonetic component that is extremely rarely used apart from the word for "to sneeze". Of course, you know hundreds of characters by now, so you remember the phonetic 是 shi4 with the sound "ti" in the very common word 提供 ti2gong1 'to offer, put forward; to provide', which helps you remember the right-bottom part of 嚔, but you still have to remember the exact right-top part. Is it like the top part of 志, 壺 or 索? Maybe something like the top of (simplified Chinese) 卖? Based on this story and out of curiosity, I've actually asked many Chinese speakers to write 打噴嚏 da3 pen1ti4 for me, and it's usually the right-top part of 嚏 that they get wrong if they get it wrong. (Unlike the author of this story, I've never seen anybody shrugging and not attempt to write it though.)

I think it's cases like this one that it might be worth making a mnemonic or story for, but you're asking what I do personally, and I usually just try to memorize a difficult character either straight or with a sequence, and that's that. I never actually use any of these websites or books that explain characters.
Last edited by Querneus on Thu Oct 25, 2018 10:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
4 x

User avatar
atcprunner
White Belt
Posts: 14
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:04 pm
Location: Beijing
Languages: English (N), Mandarin (C1), French (B2), Spanish (B2), Russian (B1), German (B2), Old English, Latin
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=4381
x 19

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby atcprunner » Wed Oct 10, 2018 11:46 am

Hi there.

Have you heard of the HSK tests? There are some good lists for the different test levels. When I started out i tried some books that used stories and mnemonic devices. In the long run nothing seemed to work better than just buckling down and writing the characters over and over every day. I'd so go with maybe ten characters a day that are part of words. I went through the whole 5000 word list for HSK like this. Meanwhile use some graded reading materials so it's not just vocab work.

This book was pretty good for character knowledge. https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing- ... B017QL9QVY
3 x
SC French Books Full: 29 / 100
SC Spanish Books Full: 13 / 100
SC German Books Full: 36 / 100
SC Russian Books Full: 0 / 100
SC Mandarin Books Full: 0 / 100

User avatar
verdastelo
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2016 1:20 pm
Languages: Punjabi (N), Hindi-Urdu (near-native), English (C1+), Russian (B1+), French (A2+), Chinese (A1+), Kannada (A0+)
x 740

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby verdastelo » Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:05 pm

Zegpoddle wrote:For those of you with experience trying to learn written Chinese:

What resources do you find most useful in analyzing characters into their constituents to make them easier to learn and remember?


Because I find it easier to memorise characters by learning their etymology, my favourite resource is Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary by Rick Harbaugh.

Image

Each character is broken down into its phonetic and semantic components. Here is what a typical definition in the dictionary looks like.

Image

You might want to head to http://zhongwen.com/ if you are interested in exploring more. Although the design is a throwback from the 1990s, the website is an accurate digital replica of the dictionary. Select Learn, enter one or more characters (traditional form) into the text box, and press Submit.
1 x
The life of man is but a succession of vain hopes and groundless fears. — Monte(s)quieu

User avatar
zKing
Orange Belt
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon May 15, 2017 11:59 pm
Location: Seattle Area
Languages: English(N), Learning: Cantonese, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7973
x 729

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby zKing » Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:37 pm

I'm in the "don't really worry about it" camp. I used Heisig's "Remembering Traditional Hanzi: Book 1" for the first 1500 characters. I did kind-of use his stories early on and used Anki. I have casually read stuff about the origins of the characters, but I've never really studied it. With that first 1500 character base I just started reading and looking up characters/words as I encountered them. I have no idea how many characters I now "know" (whatever that means)... but I can read a lot of stuff fairly comfortably (e.g. subtitles), other more difficult stuff not so much but recently I've been far more focused on the spoken language. I've also noticed that I can often guess approximately how some new character should be pronounced, although I'd bet in many cases it is a character I don't consciously remember, but I've seen before. (Note that my TL is Cantonese, not Mandarin and I don't hand write anything.) Past those very early stages, I haven't really used mnemonics/stories; at some early point they didn't seem to be worth the trouble. Even if I someday turned my focus back from the spoken language to reading, I wouldn't feel the need to do anything more than just a s*** ton of intensive reading.

If the goal is to read/write, I'd bet that a deep understanding of the radicals/origins has a VERY rapid diminishing return on the time invested.
1 x

白田龍
Orange Belt
Posts: 242
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:54 pm
Languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Persian, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese.
x 444

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby 白田龍 » Sat Oct 20, 2018 2:39 am

The only way to really understand Chinese characters is of course to trace them back to seal script and jiaguwen when possible.

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... ncient.php
http://hanziyuan.net

Traditional etymologies usually come from the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi, but many have been shown erroneous with modern research. The origins of some characters were not known untill Oracle Bone Script was discovered in 1977.

if your goal is to to Heisig style mnemonics, however, real etymologies are probably not the best way to go, because the components of the characters have changed as the writing styles evolved....

let's say the character 音, you may think of it as someone standing (立) and speaking (曰), thus making sound... but etymologically this is all wrong. 音 is actually 言 with an extra dot inside the 口, symbolizing the sound coming out. (言 on its turn is 一 over 舌, indicating that which is spoken out of the tongue)

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=音
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=言

So what is 去? the top part, looking like 士, is actually 大, the bottom part, looking like ㄙ, is 口. The pictograph shows a big person stradling a mouth, indicating big+mouth, meaning to open your mouth. It probably became to mean go as a phonetic borrowing... (I wasn't really able to understand the explanation in Chinese...)

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=去

Is 是, 日 and 正?
no, its 早 and 止:
http://hanziyuan.net/#是

is 冀= 北+田+共?
no, that's just a big person with hands, feet, and a cat mask:
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=冀
http://hanziyuan.net/#冀

Can you guess where 先 comes from?
thats person (人) under foot (止), indicating the one who walks first, the original meaning is the first person in a queue.
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=先

夒 is funny, thats the pictograph of a monkey, with a hairy head and seated body (頁), hands (drawn like foot (止) (originally 又 or 爪), a worm (巳) like tail, and a downward pointing foot (夊).

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=夒

The 身 in 射 came from a compound of 弓 and 矢 (bow and arrow). 寸 is a hand plucking the string (originally 又).
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/l ... php?word=射
3 x

白田龍
Orange Belt
Posts: 242
Joined: Wed Mar 21, 2018 6:54 pm
Languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Persian, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese.
x 444

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby 白田龍 » Mon Oct 29, 2018 4:00 pm

I have just stumbled into this https://kanjiportraits.wordpress.com/
It gives detailed explainations, in English, about the characters' origins.
0 x

David1917
Blue Belt
Posts: 596
Joined: Mon Nov 06, 2017 2:36 am
Location: USA
Languages: English (N)
Professional Level: Russian, Spanish
x 1564

Re: Your preferred sources for understanding Chinese characters

Postby David1917 » Tue Oct 30, 2018 12:53 am

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Characters-Compounds/dp/080484299X

This book forever. The way he has ordered the characters building off the radicals and then each other and the short etymological descriptions he provides certainly contributed to my complete obsession with Chinese writing. Buy this book.
1 x


Return to “Practical Questions and Advice”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests