Some thoughts about my dear book about Chinese Characters

Several years ago I wrote a book about Chinese characters called Understanding Chinese Characters. What started out as small research for my personal study purposes turned into this gigantic project that took more than 5 years of very intensive research and writing to complete and even though I did most of the work alone, there were almost 30 people involved helping me. Many many thanks to them, especially those who were very involved and the book could never have been finished without them. When I was done I was so tired and burned out, that even though I managed to push the book over the finish line with 100% diligence, after I self-published, I had no energy left for promotion whatsoever. 

I'm not a sales person anyway and I feel very uneasy when I have to talk about something I did not to mention promote myself or a product or an idea I worked on, so I submitted the book only to one publishing house and when I got rejected (which happens all the time and I accepted it normally) I only put the book on my blog and let it live it's own life. 

I am very surprised and happy that to this day with basically zero promotion and with the book being hidden on my blog there were almost 200 people who were interested in it enough to buy it. Many thanks to everyone who did.

In either case, the reason why I'm writing this article now is because a reader left a comment under the article where I talk about my book and asked a few questions, the most important being: how is my book different from all other books about Chinese characters? 

A lot of time has passed since my Chinese character burn out and when I read his comment I realized that a reader who doesn't know my work from my Understanding Chinese Characters youtube channel really does not know why I think my book is the best book about Chinese characters ever written! :) All jokes on me. 

He mentioned one Russian book to me and told me that to him it essentially looks the same as mine except for the colors and I have to agree. On the surface and without any explanation the two layouts do look similar:

Discussions with my Slovak-born Chinese friend about tones in Mandarin Chinese

Recently I've been going to my friend's Chinese restaurant every Saturday to eat and have a good time for a few hours with my local Slovak-Chinese friends.

I've been always fascinated with perfectly bi-lingual and bi-cultural people - the more complex or unexpected the combination the better. My friend's parents are from the ZheJiang province in South-East China. He was in China for 3 years from 6 to 9 years old to learn Mandarin (until then he only spoke his local ZheJiang dialect at home with his parents) and came back to Slovakia right before he would have learned anything about the structure of Mandarin in Chinese schools as Chinese students do.

He speaks Mandarin completely by feel, at a native level, albeit with a limited vocabulary and sometimes limited expressions, but at a native level. He speaks Slovak better than Mandarin. He feels more Slovak/European than Chinese. 

Since I started learning Mandarin, I was always most curious about how native speakers perceived tones, how and whether at all they think about them when they speak and it was quite difficult to talk about this to educated Chinese native speakers, because they all had learned about the structure of Mandarin in school which influenced their perception. 

My friend however knows nothing about Mandarin structure, speaks it intuitively and the following, to me fascinating, discussion took place:

Substance and Form

When I was younger, say between 13 and 21, to a great extent, I was much better at speaking foreign languages because I didn't really care that much about what I was saying :) 

To me it was important that I had a good accent, that I sounded like a native speaker and it was often at the cost of substance - the actual message I was delivering and the way I was structuring it. I might have sounded 100% like someone from New Jersey, but if you paid close attention to what I was saying, it wasn't very coherent. Now, provided, I was young at that time I wouldn't expect my younger self to be very coherent in the first place but I think I would have had struggled even if I had tried. 

As I got older, I started to realize that substance was actually quite important. Surprise (笑). As a lot of people, I imagine, I realized that most of what I was saying, no matter how complicated, was just a resonance of what was said around me. Almost everything I was saying and even thinking was something I'd heard from someone else before, only gravitating to those thoughts and language that was appealing to me and not forming it myself. 

How polyglots learn foreign languages - University research questionnaire

Hello everyone,

a university student from Finland asked me if I could answer some questions for his Master's thesis about how polyglots learn foreign languages. It's not like I get flooded with requests like this every day. I am very honored, that someone would like to hear my opinion for academic research and every time I am asked to summarize how I learn I feel like I get better and better at summarizing something I have no idea how to summarize :) 

I suspected my answers would turn into a small essay so I decided to post the text as an article for anyone interested as well.

Vladimir

1) Mother tongue(s): 

Slovak/Czech, Hungarian

2) Enlist the languages you know and evaluate the level of each according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, eg. Spanish C1 etc. (descriptions of the levels available on the last part of this questionnaire).

Current level:

Slovak C2

Czech C2

English C2

Mandarin C2/C1

Spanish C1

Italian C1

German C1

Russian C1

Hungarian B2

French B2

Portuguese B1

Classical Chinese B1

Latin B1

I learned other languages as well, but my current level in them is very poor. Maybe worth mentioning only might be, that when I was more involved with languages, apart from the above, I was able to hold a decent conversation without having to switch to English in: Polish, Serbian and Persian.

Are Simplified Chinese Characters really that new?

The great majority of Simplified Chinese characters* were created during the simplification process in the 20th century in the PRC. What is however probably not very well known is that a lot of what we call Simplified Chinese Characters today are characters that are very old themselves.

These characters may have originally had meanings that were not the same as the characters they replaced in the simplification process, or they sometimes were alternative modern or older versions of the same character but in either case, these Simplified Characters existed for a very long time in history as well (as will be shown, often for more than 2500 years).

The point of this post is not to argue that all Simplified Chinese characters are old, or praise their age and neglect the fact that they don't corrupt the phonetic and semantic elements of Traditional characters they replaced. I'm simply stating an interesting fact and addressing the common misconception that all Simplified Chinese characters were created ad hoc in the in the simplification process in the 20th century.

Furthermore, the simplification in the 20th century by the PRC government wasn't the first one in Chinese character history. There were several ones, some large-scale and systematic, others having the nature of random improvements, with the 20th century one being the most recent one. These previous simplifications also often corrupted individual character elements rendering them irrecognizable as will be shown below.

To name just a few all following Traditional characters had previously been simplified with their originals clearly containing recognizable phonetic and/or semantic elements:

年
Original meaning "to harvest grain" formed by 禾 (meaning grain) and 千 phonetic (pronounced qian1) originally written as 秊
https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char=%E5%B9%B4

表
Original meaning "outer side of garment" formed by 衣 semantic (meaning "clothes") and 毛 phonetic (pronounced mao2) originally written as 𧘝
https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char=%E8%A1%A8

Language Trivia

Hello everyone. I made a list of language-related questions for a friend of mine for a trivia game and I thought I would post the questions here for fun.

The rules are:

A) No google:)
B) If you get the whole question right, you get a point
C) Feel free to write your answers in the comments

Here are the questions:

1) Name the three largest Indoeuropean language families in Europe

2) Name 5 major Germanic languages

3) Name 5 major Romance languages

4) Name 7 major Slavic languages

5) Name 3 major Ugro-Finnic languages

Impossible tasks and bad techniques

If you see someone trying to lift a 500 kg stone with rollerblades on their feet, maybe knowing that that person had never done any exercise in their lives before, it's clear to you that that person will not lift the stone.

Firstly, the stone is just too heavy and secondly, it's really a dumb idea to try to lift it with your rollerblades on.

Unfortunately, the way people are trying to achieve language proficiency in some languages, is something you cannot see with your eyes, and a lot of people simply don't realize that either the goal they are working towards is impossible to achieve or the methods they are using will not work.

Some very difficult languages just cannot be learned to a satisfactory level with current methods. It's just like trying to lift that very heavy rock with rollerblades on.

So..if you are learning a language and are not making progress the problem might not be your lack of talent, but rather the fact, that with the methods you are using, you just objectively cannot learn what you are trying to learn.

Multilevel text analysis

Sometimes people ask me whether I use any special methods to learn languages so quickly and so well. These are their words, not mine:) I think language learning is very difficult, takes forever and I think I make a ton of mistakes in every language I speak including my native language. I used to say that talent, passion, focus and a lot of time are probably what influence my results most, but there are also a few methods that I like to use and I wanted to write about one today.

When I'm learning a new language, I like to analyze it on my own. The usual way I used to go about this was to make notes directly into the text I was reading, but this would get messy very quickly, especially when I knew very little or nothing about the language, because I needed to take a lot of notes:

My notes on Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic wars. Latin.

The advantage of this approach for me is, that I can write notes or translations of the text I'm analyzing directly into the text in any language I feel fits the translation/analysis best. If, for instance, in the text I come across a noun in accusative, I write the translation of that word into my native Slovak, because it also has an accusative and represents the form of the Latin original in my mind perfectly. If it's some strange verbal form, I usually write the translation in Italian (or English), since its verbal system is quite complex and derived from Latin and I usually can find a very good match. If it's some rare expression, I usually translate it into English or Slovak, since my vocabulary base is best in these two languages.

Understanding Chinese characters is a book that compiles years of Chinese character study in a concise and understandable way for the learner. Learn to understand Chinese characters for what they really are with a book that is easy to use, combining the best modern Chinese character academic research with the best learner experience.

Written by Vladimir Skultety, a graduate of Chinese studies specialized in Chinese character etymology and a polyglot speaking 15 languages working as an interpreter of Mandarin Chinese, English and Slovak.


Buy PDF for € 24.99 (+VAT)


Free Character practice sheets included

Download a FREE 50 page preview


Key features

• suitable for anyone looking to understand and learn Chinese characters quickly and effectively
• simple enough for beginners, detailed and accurate enough for advanced learners
• characters in the book cover up to 70% of most modern texts written in Chinese
• contains both Traditional and Simplified characters 
• free printable character practice sheets with correct stroke order included
• based on years of extensive and very detailed academic research, but written in a way which avoids academic clutter
• high quality color images
• custom designed illustrations
• custom painted Oracle bone characters
• licensed beautiful Seal Script font
• 273 pages

Learn to read Chinese with manga

Hello everyone,

I started an experimental series on Youtube called Learn to read Chinese with manga. Feel free to check it out if you like.

I found reading to be a fantastic aid which helped me learn most of the languages I speak because of the following:

• the language is 'frozen in time'. When you listen to something, even if it's a recording that you can rewind, words flow very quickly. When you are reading something, the language is frozen and laid out on the pages you read and you can read whatever you want at your own discretion. 
• you can look for patterns in the language (crucial for learning a foreign language) much more effectively, because you can quickly compare something you see on page 7 with what you saw on page 3 etc. enabling you to get to your Aha! moment quicker
• you can make notes directly onto the page you are reading
• you have more time to analyze the structure of the language because you don't have the speed of the language to fight with
• you can constantly return with your eyes to the Aha! words/constructions on the page you are reading (repetition - crucial for remembering new information)

I also found that when reading a foreign language, the absolute best thing ever is, when beneath the text I have a literal translation of what is written word by word in Neanderthal and then a translation of the same thing in nice English, as it should be said by an educated native speaker like so:

Latin	Praeterea se neque sine exercitu in eas partes Galliae venire audere, quas Caesar possideret, neque exercitum sine magno commeatu atque molimento in unum locum contrahere posse.
Neanderthal	Moreover himself neither without an army into those parts of Gaul to come to dare, which Caesar possessed, nor an army without great supply and difficulty into one place to bring together to be able
Nice English	That, besides, neither dare he go without an army into those parts of Gaul which Caesar had possession of, nor could he, without great expense and trouble, draw his army together to one place

If you are reading something on your own, the most tedious task is to work out the Neanderthal version and the nice English version on your own.

All of the above is exactly what I am trying to achieve in this video series: