Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?

LEE Sau Dan wrote:
"Sébastien" == Sébastien de Mapias <sglrigaud@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Sébastien> (in China and elsewhere...) Hi again,

Sébastien> 1/ So given the extreme difference between our
Sébastien> alphabet(s) and the "sinogrammes" (is there a word
Sébastien> equivalent in English ?), how many years of school do
Sébastien> the Chinese pupils spend learning their writing system
Sébastien> ??

In Hong Kong, schoolchildren can alreay read and write simple texts
and letters by the time of grade 3 (about 9 years of age). And upon
finishing primary school (grade 6, age 12), they can already read
newspapers and novels without problems.

Sébastien> Are there thousands of characters *only*,

No. There are tends of thousands, if you check the Kangxi dictionary.


Sébastien> or are we talking about tens of thousands of characters
Sébastien> to retain ??

No. Some analysis found that an adult knows around 6000 characters
(which is also what one achieves upon finishing primary school), and
can actively use around 3000-4000 of them.

Now, I ask you a similar question about French/English: how many
*morpheme* do you know? How many *morpheme* are there in these
languages? Your question about no. of characters is as difficult to
answer as these questions. Each character is a morpheme. And thanks
to the irregular spellings of English and French, you have to learn
the spellings of each morpheme, too. Is that a big difference? I
don't think so. The difference is quite superficial.

Sébastien> Pretty early in France (after 4 or 5 years if I
Sébastien> correctly remember) we start doing class written
Sébastien> assignments (that we call "dissertations"), is there
Sébastien> any stage during their schooling where young Chinese
Sébastien> can do the same ?!?

I started composition in Chinese at grade 3. But I also started
writing personal, informal letters at grade 1.

Sébastien> 2/ I read there are 214 keys: do ALL characters contain
Sébastien> one of these ? Or there are exceptions ??

These are called "radicals". And by definition, every character has
to contain one of them. Some of the radicals are 'dedicated' to just
one or a few characters. Putting it the other way around, those
radicals are made "radicals" so as to fulfill the rule: every
character contains a radical.

BTW, the no. of radicals depends on orthographic conventions. 214 is
the number used in the Kangxi dictionary. Other dictionaries may
differ, although most follow the well accepted convention established
by Kangxi.

It's worth stressing that, as implied by Sau Dan's "by definition", the Kangxi radical system is relatively artificial and arbitrary, and has to be stretched to fit in every character. I've been using it with dictionaries for 43 years, and am quite comfortable with it, but I still sometimes have trouble with it from time to time.

Dylan mentioned the variability of the methods used for simplified characters. It's not unusual to find several dictionaries, each with a slightly different approach.

Looking up a character by radical can be a three-step process. Virtually any dictionary that uses some kind of "radical" approach will include a numbered list of its radicals, organized by stroke count. In a second table, each of these radicals will serve as a header to a column of the characters that belong under it, again organized by stroke count. Each character then has a page number next to it where you can find the main entry and the compounds that have that character as the first element.

If you're familiar with the radical system being used, and if the dictionary is ordered by radical, you can often skip the first two steps and just scan for the character you want. I can do that with the Kangxi system, but tend to get a bit lost in the various modern systems, which is why I don't like them. It's basically due to laziness.

Sébastien> 3/ Let's say I'm a 30-year old Chinese, quietly
Sébastien> listening my favorite radio/TV station: suddenly the
Sébastien> speaker uses a syllable/word I've never heard before:

That occurs frequently. We have new words from time to time. This is
especially true for Cantonese, where new slangs come and go very
quickly.

Sébastien> how will I manage to find it in my dictionary (which is
Sébastien> a good one but does not contain pinyin entries;

In Chinese, new words are usually made by compounding existing
morphemes. So, the characters used are obvious.

I don't think that's what his question is about. Suppose you hear the term ye1hu2 on the radio, how will you find out what it means? I suppose you could write down all the characters you know that are pronounced "ye1", and all those pronounced "hu2", then look for a combination that makes sense in the original context.

(I'm actually cheating with this term, which is a bit specialized. If you saw the characters, you could probably figure out what it refers to. None of my Chinese-English dictionaries has that particular compound. If you can figure it out with neither the characters nor the context, I'll be impressed.)

The _ABC Dictionary_ has already been mentioned. Another possibility is to crank up your computer, open a text file, and type using a Pinyin input method. The ITABC method on the Mac (for simplified characters) permits input of compounds, and will show a list of homophonous compounds (in characters). You can scan these and try to pick one that makes sense in the context in which you heard it. This is much clumsier than using the _ABC Dictionary_.

Some Chinese-Chinese dictionaries are ordered by Pinyin, so you can scan through the compounds that start with a certain sound, looking at the following character(s) for matches with the rest of the compound. The really isn't much harder than looking words up in an English-language dictionary. Some Chinese-English dictionaries even have the Pinyin for every compound.

It's not the language or the writing system that makes it hard to look up words by sound, it's tradition.

By the way, as I mentioned above, if someone who reads Chinese were to run across my "ye1hu2" example written in a text, she could get a pretty good idea of the meaning from the morphemes represented by the two characters, even if she couldn't find the compound in any dictionary--especially in an appropriate context. This is exactly like running across a previously unlearned English word composed of recognizable morphemes--even non-native ones, as in "autodidact" or "coprocephalous". If you know the morphemes involved, you have a good chance of guessing the meaning. Of course, sometimes you fail, as I did when I first saw the word "autocephalous" with no context.

My point is that written Chinese compounds are at least as easy to figure out as English compounds--often easier.

Sébastien> by the way, do Chinese dictionaries have pinyin
Sébastien> references ?) ??

Only recent ones published for Mandarin-capable people. Pinyin is
useless when one has to look up an unfamiliar character he has
encountered upon reading.

That's generally true, though you can often get clues from the phonetic elements--and more if you know the Cantonese, Hakka, or Hokkien pronunciations of lots of characters. There is generally some ambiguity, but it's not entirely impossible.

Where Pinyin lookup is useful is when you know how to pronounce the characters involved, but don't know the precise meaning of the compound.

How useful it is depends on the individual. I do fine looking up traditional characters using the Kangxi radical system, but I prefer Pinyin for dictionaries that use simplified characters (which I hate and despise--and don't like very much).

Traditional dictionaries use the 214 (more or less) radicals as an
indexing mechanism. Since it is based on the shape of a the
character, you don't need to know the pronunciation of it a priori.

Sébastien> 4/ The other way: I'm reading my favorite newspaper,
Sébastien> and here I stumble against a character I've never seen
Sébastien> before: how can I read it aloud ??

You can't read it aloud with absolute certainty.

If you already know enough characters to read a newspaper, you'll probably know one or more characters that share a phonetic element with the character that you're looking at. That will let you come up with something that will satisfy you.

Also, if that character is part of a compound that you already know, and if you know the other character(s) appearing in that compound, a close guess of the sound may be enough of a clue to figure out that you're seeing that particular compound.

Frankly, though, I doubt that most educated Chinese run into new characters very often. They're much more likely to need to look up unfamiliar compounds--especially precise technical ones. If you are pretty familiar with a field, even new compounds may be pretty transparent. As a non-native speaker, I've been able to read a bit in Chinese linguistics and figure out terms like "aspirated", "affricate", "on-glide", and "retroflex" just by knowing the basic meanings of the characters involved and seeing those terms in an appropriate context.

Why bother about reading it aloud?

Some of us just can't help ourselves.

We can often guess the meaning
from the signific parts of the character. And that's already enough
for reading comprehension. Why bother about pronunciation?

Often is fine, but lots of characters aren't readily analyzable by form. If you can't pronounce one, how do you know which elements are phonetic and which--if any--are semantic?

There are lots of characters that consist of the "gold" radical and a phonetic. Not all of them refer to metals, and if you couldn't pronounce them, even the ones that do refer to metals would give you no clue whatsoever as to which metal that might be.

Sébastien> How can I know how to pronounce it ??

If you really need to know the pronunciation, you use traditional
dictionaries to look up the character. But most people don't bother
to waste such time. Just like an English speaker trying to guess what
"gouvernement" on a news headline of a French newspaper means. He may
have guessed "government" owing to the similarity in spelling, even
though he has no idea how a Frenchman would pronounce that French
word. If he's not studying French, he won't even bother to find out
the pronunciation of this French word. (How many English speakers can
pronounce the loan word "deja-vu" the French way? And do they care?)

But we're talking about native speakers reading their own language. When I run across an English word that I don't know, I always look it up, unless it's totally inconvenient. I may be able to guess from context and other clues, but I've found that I'm often wrong--or at least not quite right.

I've even occasionally guessed wrong about a pronunciation.

When "close" and "possibly right" are good enough is a matter of taste. My time is not particularly valuable, and I find it more irritating not to know than to go through the process of finding out.

Anyhow, how often do *you* run across a character that you don't know?

The pitfall of this example lies in that there is a spelling
similarity between "government" and "gouvernement". For Chinese, the
clues are not in spelling, but in the components of a character.

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

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