I’m studying Chinese characters now. I have an ambition to study Chinese (how cool to be trilingual) and I’ve decided to make the valiant effort to learn it all – listening, speaking…and reading and writing. I’ve received several warnings however: “Oh, Chinese is too hard for foreigners to learn to write. You can just learn to speak maybe.” What kind of attitude is that? Full speed ahead!

Hmmm…I’m now wondering if I’m in over my head. These characters are nuts. Imagine each simple word in the English language is represented by a letter of the alphabet. You’d have to expand the alphabet by…how many thousands of letters? That’s right; there’s no such thing as an alphabet in Chinese. I’m not exactly sure what the approximate number is for all Chinese characters. Twenty thousand? Thirty-five thousand? Ug. OK, that is not possible for me to learn. But, guess what! If I learn about four or five thousand, I’ll be able to read a newspaper. I think the average literate Chinaman has a written vocabulary of not much bigger than that. All those extra characters are mostly reserved for literature. Don’t forget the other challenging thing of this monosyllabic language: combinations of these characters is what forms more complex words.

I’ve learned maybe 120 characters so far. I’d say about 70 or 80 of those I know very well and can recognize and write easily. Still working on the other 40. Plus, I just finished another lesson where I learned about 25 more. I’ll need to write them each about 15 times to learn them well, and I have to revisit them or use them in the real world or I forget. Also, I find that if I want to recognize a character, the best way to do that is to learn to write it. However, the ability write fades pretty fast if I haven’t really drilled it in, but fortunately, the recognition stays. Reading is more important than writing.

Another neat things is that by writing I’m starting to recognize the structure of the characters. Though I don’t understand the vast majority, when I do see a new one, I can recognize the structure, the individual components, and I’m pretty good at figuring out the proper order of strokes. Plus, it seems like to really know Chinese, the language and the culture, understanding the characters makes a lot of sense.

For example, this character:

ç”·

is “nan” (tone 2). It means “male”. This character is actually made up of two other basic characters:

田 力

The first is “tian” (tone 2) meaning “field”, basically. The second is “li” (tone 4) meaning “strength”. See the idea? “Strength for working in the field.” Pretty cool, eh? But, then again, there’s not much sense, that I’ve learned anyway, from the character for “female”:

女

This is the character “nv” (tone 3), the “v” is just symbolic of a special pronunciation of the letter “u”.

There are many characters that are combinations of simpler characters. Then there are these things called “radicals” which are like mini characters (though they can sometimes be more complex than regular characters) which basically indicates a “theme”. For example, you can have a “water” radical which expresses liquids, or another radical that indicates certain types of animals. But, sometimes, more often than not, it seems like there’s no logic to it at all.

Check these out:

猪 猫 猩

Notice the symbol on the left is the same in all? This is the “radical” expressing types of animals. But, I have yet to understand the classification. And, I haven’t asked because I have so many more pressing questions. These are the characters (l-r): zhu (tone 1) or “pig”, mao (tone 1) or “cat”, and xing (tone 1) which, when paired with another “xing”, means “gorilla”. :-o

OK, that’s enough confusion now. I’m starting to get mixed up again.