Hiya, gang! How’s life treating you? I’ve got a ton to talk about this morning, but I’m going to need to pick and choose what I delve into. Perhaps I’ll bookmark them here and come back to expand on the topics at a later date. Yes. That seems to be the best course.
So, here’s the topics:
1. Aric’s interview
2. Time markers
3. Identifying characters by sound loan
4. The importance of revisiting old lessons
5. Multi-media reinforcement
Right then. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of it. I’ll see what I have time for today and save the rest for another day. Ready? Good!
1. Tomorrow’s Friday Five interview is with my friend and yours, Aric Queen! This interview was conducted prior to his Indonesian excursion, but don’t think you’re missing anything. Aric’s a helluva guy. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the man, and if you’re not already, tomorrow’s Friday Five just might turn you around. Be here, people.
2. This is the big subject that I wanted to talk about the other day, but I have to tell you… I learned even more about this last night and I want to let it gestate in my head a bit before I try to “teach” it to others. I’ll tackle this one over the weekend. Stay tuned!
3. I’ve got a book at home that I keep in the “reading room” (read: bathroom). I’m not “studying” it, per se, but I started at the beginning and I’m slowly, very slowly, making my way through it.
The book, Reading & Writing Chinese: Simplified Character Edition, has been a great help to me in understanding what it is I’m looking at as I do these lessons. It’s helping me see the characters as an assemblage of radicals (building blocks), instead of a random collection of slashes, dots and boxes. Perhaps the most useful thing I’ve noticed lately is the concept of the “sound loan.” That is, a character that is created using another character, whose presence gives the reader a clue as to how that character is to be spoken.
Confused? Stay with me. I’m just getting the hang of this myself. Let me show you what I mean. Let’s have a look at the characters for gao and wang, and see how I spotted them recently in other characters.
Here’s the original characters. (And by original, I mean those instances where I first encountered them. Your mileage may vary.)
高
gāo
high / tall
Which I saw again here:
高兴
gāo xìng
happy / glad
Easy enough, right? The meaning doesn’t even change all that much. But then I spied that sucker creeping around in this word…
搞错
gǎo cuò
make a mistake
Note that this is a different tone. A different meaning. But the appearance of that character in there gave me a great mnemonic for remembering how that word sounds. Pretty cool, huh? Here’s another:
王平
wáng píng
Wang Ping
This is just a name, but the character stuck with me. So when I saw it again hiding at the bottom of the second character below, I had a clue as to how that word would sound:
希望
xī wàng
to hope
See it? Sneaky little bugger, eh? It thought it could slip past us, but we’re too fast for it! You gotta watch these radicals, folks. One second they’re making new words, the next they’re stealing cars and drinking Miller Lite at the local Stop-n-Go. It’s a world gone mad, I tell ya!
4. When I started my Octagon training with Aggie, she gave me a list of the 40 lessons that we’d be covering over the course of that 8 weeks. I saw that I’d already done some of the lessons, and she had told me to tell her if that happened so she could swap them out with new material. I didn’t. As the last five weeks have played out, I’m really glad I made that decision.
The first time I went through these lessons, I was firmly in the Newbie camp and my retention of the material was far from total. Being an Elementary learner, I revisit these lessons with a new confidence that’s serving me well. Repetition is a powerful learning tool and I’m attacking those old lessons with a level of retention I couldn’t have attempted before.
Lesson learned? Learn. Rinse. Repeat.
5. Hey! Kudos to you if you made it this far! This has got to be one of the longest blog posts ever! 
And now it’s audience participation time! Yes, that means YOU!
No matter what your level, you’ve no doubt found some method of learning Chinese that occurs off and away from this site. I want to hear about it! No matter how strange or how common, I want to know what works for you. Maybe you’ll be able to share something that helps someone else! Bring it on!
Aaaaaaand, I’m spent.
See you tomorrow, kids.
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Sometimes when the language starts making sense it is just lulling you into a false sense of security before it springs a character like 浣 at you. Any reasonably sane person would probably guess wan2 on first sight of this… and thereby get hit full on by double Chinese smackdown. Not only is the sound different than expected, but the tone is also different. The character means raccoon, and is usually found in 浣熊 (huan4xiong2).
On the bright side, at least raccoon has something to do with water, so the 水 radical on the left makes sense at least.
I’ve found that studying the characters and learning why they are written the way they are has helped me in my memorization of vocabulary.
The next study method I am going to tackle is looking up a word like gao1 in Wenlin (my chinese dictionary) and then look at and study all the words that contain gao1 in it. I have a friend who did that and it helped him tremendously.
Thanks for your insights!
Monika
Frank,
I’m excited to see your discovery of the “sound loan.” Like you, when I began learning Chinese I was excited to find this “shortcut” to learning Chinese characters. I turned it into a long road, though, by exploring the ways these components are related in different characters.
So that my discoveries can benefit others, I’ve put my research on the web. For example, if you want to find a lot of characters (and words) that contain 高 gao1 you could start here:
http://chinese-characters.org/contained/9/9AD8.html
In some of the characters 高 is a “sound loan,” or phonetic, component. In others it is a meaning component and in a few it is an apparent component (eg. it looks like it belongs there but it really doesn’t).
The site is a work in progress but there is information on over 4000 characters there already. Right now I’m compiling etymologies (histories) of the characters - which tend to be really interesting - but soon I’ll be including some tutorials such as the one you presented above.
I’d love any and all feedback.
http://chinese-characters.org/discussion/?p=10059
Bright Outlook
I think I heard that this is a phonetic guide about 70% of the time. Just remember that these characters were created a long time, when Chinese was spoken differently than today (maybe even a different dialect?) so some of the “same sounds” are only somewhat similar in modern Mandarin.
I’m in awe of watching peope write in Chinese or Japanese charactors. I couldn’t imaginge learning. My wife blows me a way, she’s Japanese every time she writes.
Bright Sparks,
I would like to give feedback on your chin.char site, but of a general nature not for specific characters, which your link above and the site’s blog is set up for.
Do you have an email or a general blog page?
But a quick feedback - fantastic site!
Anyone,
If someone has a link to a brief overview of the historical phonetic development of Chinese, looking at the implications for phonetic components of characters created at various times, I am guessing that it would be helpful to many.