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

"Mike" == Mike Wright <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

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

Mike> I don't think that's what his question is about. Suppose you
Mike> hear the term ye1hu2 on the radio, how will you find out
Mike> what it means?

Context.



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

I can't agree more. And it's often easier because there is usually
only 1 root word for one idea in Chinese, while English often has 3
roots for the same thing, such as colour vs. chrom- vs. chlor-.


Mike> Where Pinyin lookup is useful is when you know how to
Mike> pronounce the characters involved,

and in Mandarin.

Mike> but don't know the precise meaning of the compound.


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

Probably, that's because the radical system is not yet
well-standardized for simplified characters? For traditional
characters, the 214 Kangxi radicals is taken as a golden reference.



Mike> Frankly, though, I doubt that most educated Chinese run into
Mike> new characters very often.

Seldom. We usually encounter unfamiliar, rare characters when we come
across personal names, place names and company names. Many people
like to use rarer characters for names, so as to be more unique. But
this make it harder for the general public to pronounce these names
correctly. That's the price to pay for the uniqueness. :)



Mike> They're much more likely to need to look up unfamiliar
Mike> compounds--especially precise technical ones.

Technical people learn technical terms from technical training and
education, not from dictionaries. Non-technical people may not be
interested in knowing the details behind technical terms. They may
tend to use the unfamiliar compound as an opaque expression. Just
like "laser" in English.


Mike> If you are pretty familiar with a field, even new compounds
Mike> may be pretty transparent.

That's true.


Mike> As a non-native speaker, I've been able to read a bit in
Mike> Chinese linguistics and figure out terms like "aspirated",
Mike> "affricate", "on-glide", and "retroflex" just by knowing the
Mike> basic meanings of the characters involved and seeing those
Mike> terms in an appropriate context.

Like German, Chinese compounds are quite direct and are usually
composed of native elements (thus unlike English "monochromatic"),
making the meaning pretty obvious.


>> Why bother about reading it aloud?

Mike> 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?

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

Most of the 214 Kangxi radicals are signific in the characters. The
remaining parts of the character is phonetic. Thus, when I encounter
a character with the "fish" radical, and context tells me that it's
the name of a fish species, I'll not bother with the pronunciation.
That character is just a visual sign for that name, whose
pronunciation remains unknown to me. I can continue with reading the
rest of the text, seeing this fish name used repeatedly, without
knowing how to pronounce this fish name. What's wrong with that?

(In extreme cases, it may turn out that this character has NO
pronunciation in Chinese, because it is a Japanese-coined character,
which only has proper pronunciation in Japanese. In other words,
that's not a Chinese character. It's a Japanese one. But that
doesn't hurt my comprehension of the text at all. After all, that
character is just a visual sign to me.)

The same can happen to my mom when she encounters English words
mentioned in Chinese newspapers articles. She doesn't know English,
but she knows the alphabet. So, she can memorize the word as a
sequence of letters (just like memorizing a number as a sequence of
digits). Then, when the same word occurs again, she know it's the
same thing. You do the same when you encounter new terms or
unfamiliar acronyms when reading ENGLISH-ONLY texts, too. It's just
the same skill.


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

Very often, knowing it's a kind of metal suffices. e.g. Laymen don't
know how to tell Uranium and Plutonium apart, nor how different they
are. They only need to know that both are metals (and usually
radioactive ones) and that these are different types of metals (not
different names of the same metal).

If the only thing that matters is that these are 2 different kinds of
metals, you could have just labelled them "A" and "B". No need to
care how to pronounce their real names.



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?)

Mike> But we're talking about native speakers reading their own
Mike> language.

When I'm reading, I don't use my speech organs. I use my eyes and
brain.

I need my speech organs only when I'm reading ALOUD.


Reading something aloud doesn't imply comprehesion.



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

Not often.

When I do, and I don't need to know how to pronounce the character, I
won't bother about the pronunciation. As mentioned above, when I read
a text, I concentrate on comprehension of the text, not the ability of
making sounds out of it. The same is true when I encounter unknown
English/French words.


When you do arithmetics with pencil and paper, do you tend to
pronounce the numbers you see? I don't.


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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