January 05, 2011

The Chinese script

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone.

Since there is a fairly large amount of youtube channels, blogs or podcasts, where people can get very good information on language learning or anything related to this field, I thought that I might be talking about things that have been said many times before and decided to try to do this recording in a more academic way. I’d like to discuss a rather specific topic, but a one that still might be interesting to listeners not so familiar with the subject – the Chinese script.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and wish you a belated Happy New Year.


Chinese script

-         writing is a form in which you can express language units

Characteristics of the Chinese scritp:

  1. morphemographic
  2. syllabic
 Characters:

Han dynasty reform
8 strokes:

                                    Yong3

說文解字 (Dictionary by Xushen)
Shuo1wen2jie3zi4
The explanation of simple and analysis of compound characters

Simple
 
Wen2              ren2

Compound
 
Zi4                  jie3

Division of Chinese characters into 6 cathegories by Xushen:

  1. 象形字 – pictograms
Ri4 – Sun (Classical Chinese)

Yue4 – moon (Classical Chinese)

Ren2 – man

Mu4 – tree (Classical Chinese)

  1. 指事字 – simple indicatives
Shang4 – above

Xia4 - below

  1. 會意字 – compound indicatives
     +
Hao4 – affection towards sth.

     +
Lin2 – forest         

     +   +
Sen1 – deep forest

  1. 形聲字 – phono semantic compound characters
Qing1 – green/blueish color
     
     +
Qing3 – polite       

     +
Qing2 – situation, matter

     +
Qing1 – Clear, The Qing Dynasty

部首 bu4shou3 - radical

  1. 假借字 – phonetic loans

     +
Wo3 – I, me

  1. 轉注 – derived characters

Lao3 – Old. This is the abbreviation of the character Lao3 – old.

Kao3 – Old. The element  is added to , but the character has roughly the same meaning and rhymes with the original one. 

4 comments:

  1. Vladimir, you're amazing! I love languages. I can only speak two (so far); Spanish (Arg) and English. This year I started to learn French but I am in the so-called 'mist' period. Your Spanish is really good. I found you on Luca's website. Do you have a YouTube channel?
    Kind regards,
    Bruno

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you very much for the nice words:) I really thought I messed up the Spanish and French parts very bad, and didn't even want to post the whole thing, but then I thought that I should do a recording before I'd forget even more and would never be able to do a similar thing again.

    I don't have a youtube channel, because I am camera shy!:))

    Can you think of something specific that I could do the next recording about? I am not sure what people would prefer to listen to, since I am only starting.

    Vlad

    ReplyDelete
  3. Personally, I like interviews to Polyglots about HOW to start learning a new language and the like.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is helpful. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete