Chinese Characters 漢字

For all of you out there who are hunkering down to study Chinese characters (or Japanese kanji) after a long night of heartbreak or glee from the recent elections depending on your political bent, there is light at the end of the linguistic tunnel. It is true that study of written Chinese is all downhill after the first 2000 characters 頭2000個字最難. A short note for tonight, but something I have thought about a bit as I have recently been in the midst of a spurt of studying and learning new vocabulary.

Chinese characters are really only combinations of a limited number of parts called radicals 部首. One part gives the meaning and another part suggests the sound. What this means is that after a while it becomes easier to remember a character because you can say to yourself, “hey, I’ve seen that character somewhere before, but it had a gold radical 金 rather than a wood radical 木 so this one must sound somewhat like it but it is a type of tree rather than a metal!” It is much quicker to remember characters this way than to look at them as the jumble of lines as it seems to the uninitiated eye. At this point I can look at an entirely new character and remember it without writing it down.

Another way in which they are easy is that Chinese words are meaning combinations rather than sound combinations like English 比英文生詞容易, which makes learning new words much much easier. Tune in later and I’ll explain.