Have you ever seen the TV shows proving the efficiency of innovating memory and mind training techniques? These programs where the 10 year old kid takes a quick look to a board on which 100 words are written, and turns his back. The showman randomly asks him “tell me the word at the Xth position”, the kid proudly answers “cardiograph” without wasting the least second for a thinking. And normal human beings like you and I watch it, trying to find the trick, looking for the cheat, following the kid’s eyes to catch where he reads the words. Once you have accepted the theory, you think you might be using 10% of your brain as most people do.
I’ve been dying to be able to use 2% more since I started studying Hanzi. Chinese writing looks like shape recognition at first, meaningless shapes shouting “Forget it faguoren, I’m unrecognizable anyway”. Some interesting similarities between French and Chinese appear with this writing thing. In Chinese, Xie Hanzi means "write chinese characters". Well if you have the right pronunciation for xie, it should sound like a "pooh hanzi" in French. I turn out to be stupid sometimes.
Even though some dictionaries claim 80 000 different characters, 3000 may be enough to have a classic Chinese life. The level of character knowledge mirrors the level of education though; a well educated person may master at most 5000 Hanzi. Why are there so many? Because a Chinese character orally represents only one sound, reported to French or English, it would be one syllabus. Every sound used in oral Chinese has its own written equivalent. Moreover, the same sound can be associated to more than one Hanzi, because its meaning is different from one context to another. A bridge from Latin alphabet to Chinese Hanzi has been set up in 1979. Thus, the Pinyin language was the first step of Romanization of Hanzi. But, as if Chinese was a spoken language only, it remains very hard to master tones as they are notified in Pinyin. The reason is simple; tones written in Pinyin must be backed up by pronunciation rules in order to fit oral Chinese: if there is more than one vowel and the first vowel is i, u, or ü, then the tone mark appears on the second vowel (Wikipedia) and so on.
I’ve started recognizing few shapes after two months spent in China, such a long time with the so heavy handicap of not being able to read anything around.
Yet, once I’ve started studying the characters I noticed shapes are recurrent, and they actually mean something. These parts are called radicals and give the main meaning of a character, in theory. Still, I have no clue of what do main parts of most Hanzi mean, but I guess they are evolution of drawings. I’m even sure, as this sweet website exposes, but there is no way you can link today’s character to its origin.
Moreover, if you start digging the Hanzi culture, you quickly discover the writing styles. There are 5 ways to write Chinese, zhuànshū being the standard one. I’m killing myself to learn one character; I also luckily have a Chinese friend who masters the 5 written styles.
My hanzi practices
Five Hanzi types - Tang Yuan
Although in written Chinese, each tiny spot and line seem very important and, thus, written Chinese seems to not allowing your freestyle habit you get when you write French or English, but somehow, hanzi is flexible. Everyone has his own handwriting style and I can hardly guess the character even if I know what is exactly written. I’m still a novice, while Chinese turn handwriting to an art by the means of calligraphy.
Pinyin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
Even though some dictionaries claim 80 000 different characters, 3000 may be enough to have a classic Chinese life. The level of character knowledge mirrors the level of education though; a well educated person may master at most 5000 Hanzi. Why are there so many? Because a Chinese character orally represents only one sound, reported to French or English, it would be one syllabus. Every sound used in oral Chinese has its own written equivalent. Moreover, the same sound can be associated to more than one Hanzi, because its meaning is different from one context to another. A bridge from Latin alphabet to Chinese Hanzi has been set up in 1979. Thus, the Pinyin language was the first step of Romanization of Hanzi. But, as if Chinese was a spoken language only, it remains very hard to master tones as they are notified in Pinyin. The reason is simple; tones written in Pinyin must be backed up by pronunciation rules in order to fit oral Chinese: if there is more than one vowel and the first vowel is i, u, or ü, then the tone mark appears on the second vowel (Wikipedia) and so on.
I’ve started recognizing few shapes after two months spent in China, such a long time with the so heavy handicap of not being able to read anything around.
Yet, once I’ve started studying the characters I noticed shapes are recurrent, and they actually mean something. These parts are called radicals and give the main meaning of a character, in theory. Still, I have no clue of what do main parts of most Hanzi mean, but I guess they are evolution of drawings. I’m even sure, as this sweet website exposes, but there is no way you can link today’s character to its origin.
Moreover, if you start digging the Hanzi culture, you quickly discover the writing styles. There are 5 ways to write Chinese, zhuànshū being the standard one. I’m killing myself to learn one character; I also luckily have a Chinese friend who masters the 5 written styles.
My hanzi practices
Five Hanzi types - Tang Yuan
Although in written Chinese, each tiny spot and line seem very important and, thus, written Chinese seems to not allowing your freestyle habit you get when you write French or English, but somehow, hanzi is flexible. Everyone has his own handwriting style and I can hardly guess the character even if I know what is exactly written. I’m still a novice, while Chinese turn handwriting to an art by the means of calligraphy.
Street Calligraphy with watered brushes - Beijing
Hanzi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hanziPinyin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
2 comments:
this artical made me think of the disease of Alzheimer...chinese cannot efford to be in Alzheimer condition because they have lot to loose or nature of their language simply prevent them get in that condition because mind is always over practices with this complicated language...
a short reasearch indicates that there has been and extensive herbal treatment methods have been developed in years...
for curing?
or for preventing?
interesting to know..........good artical Julien
I had a discussion once with an american chinese student named Todd. He had read in a scientific magazine that Chinese was very hard to learn for Europeans. The reason invoked is that you have to practice your brain in a completely different way in order to master tones and writings. Chinese people have no difficulties with this since they study the language very young. It would be easy to deduce that these guys might have difficulties learning foreign languages, but I have no idea eventhough most of Chinese in Dalian speak the worse english ever.
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