Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series

First lecture in the hopefully longer series on Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series. In this lecture I try to explain what phono-semantic compound characters (形聲字) are, explain the 才 phonetic series and etymology of all characters in it.

Characters in this video:

才 cai2 - talent, material. Leading phonetic character of the group.

財 cai2 - money, wealth
材 cai2 - material
在 zai4 - to be located at
載 zai4 - to give someone a ride
裁 cai2 - to cut
戴 dai4 - to wear (clothes), to put on

Understanding Chinese Characters

Introduction

Chinese characters are a very complex system of recording the Chinese language into writing. Most of what seems to be a mix of illegible symbols is part of a logical but complex writing system that has been gradually developed around 2300 - 3000 years ago, with oldest confirmed characters dating back to around 1200 - 1050 BC. In this article I will try to briefly explain what one needs to know in order to understand Chinese characters and what you should know before you start studying them

Some basic facts:

• The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese script yet discovered is the body of inscriptions on oracle bones (cattle bones and turtle shells used in divination and fortune telling ceremonies) from the late Shang dynasty (1200-1050 BC) - Wikipedia
• According to some studies (including my own), you need to know only about 2500 characters to read the newspaper.
• About 80% of all characters are made up of two elements - one telling you how to read it and the other one telling you what it means. This is good news, because based on these two elements you should know how to pronounce and understand the meaning of 4 out of 5 Chinese characters. 80% is a huge number and if you learn how to read this type of characters and understand their system, your learning progress will be much faster. 

Benchmarks in character evolution

Oracle bone script

Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast. My guest today is a very special person. I’m sure a lot of you know him from his presence online, he was born in Sierra Leone, spent most of his life in London and currently lives in Spain. He is a lover of knowledge and a very knowledgable person, has his own website and a youtube channel, is the awe inspiring, the super positive, the one and only David Mansaray.

Some of you might  know, that a couple of months ago, David interviewed me for his website and I've always had the thought of interviewing him for my blog in the back of my mind as well, I just couldn't come up with a suitable topic.

There were several things that I was considering, but because David is a fantastic, talented learner in many different fields and it so happens that he has decided to start learning foreign languages, I thought we could discuss something related to language learning in general.

David has read lots and lots of materials on the subject and talked to a lot of people and I always wanted to ask him what his own personal observations and opinions were, so I thought it would be great if he could share some of that wealth of knowledge with us. Hope you enjoy.

Vladimir

Download

Chinese character frequency list - news articles, interview articles

Chinese word frequency list - news articles

Chinese character frequency list - interview articles only

English Italian verb list

Pinyin confusions

Pinyin is a system, which is used to transcribe the sounds of Mandarin Chinese into the Roman alphabet. It is used wherever a transcription of Chinese is needed (city names - Beijing, Shanghai, people’s names - Xi Jinping, Wen Jiabao etc.) and also but not exclusively as an input method for Chinese in computers and other devices.

Since the pronunciation of Roman letters in the many languages that use them differs from language to language, when Pinyin was created, it wasn't possible to design a system that would be universal for every language that uses Roman letters. This means, that the letters used in Pinyin are not always pronounced as they would be in your language. In other words, in Pinyin, a j is not a j and an x is not an x.

Furthermore, pinyin is also confusing because of another thing. Sometimes two different Roman letters represent the same sound and sometimes two different sounds are represented by the same one Roman letter (see below). This is confusing, because students might not initially realize that syllables like wo, shuo and po for instance share exactly the same sound.  

Sounds that are written in a different way, but represent the same sound*:

My 5 language learning tips

There have been several popular articles and books written about the importance of Motivation in Language learning, Best Language learning techniques, Top 10 most important reasons for learning a foreign language or ways of becoming a successful language learner. On my blog, I usually write articles that are quite specific and are often aimed only at a fairly narrow audience. I usually talk about various different aspects of Mandarin Chinese and other languages, which might not be that interesting to everyone, so I thought I could try to work a bit on topics that are more general just to make my blog more diverse.

I tried to keep things as simple as possible and asked myself the following question: If I had to choose only five things that would sum up all of my language learning strategies and have these five things in mind during my language studies, what would they be?  As you can imagine, this was quite a complicated question and even after giving it a lot of thought I realized that naming only five was still very challenging. 

I had to turn the question around a little bit. In the end I came to the conclusion that in my experience whenever something was going wrong in my language learning process, I was neglecting one of the following:

Motivation

Input

Output

Consistency

Review

Motivation

New Youtube channel

Hello everyone, 

I have launched a new Youtube channel as a supplement to my blog, where I would like to share some ideas about langauge learning. I'm currently working on the How to write Chinese characters playlist in which you can find videos explanaining in detail how to write Chinese characters. In each video I explain how to write these characters, explain what writing rules apply to them and what details to look out for when writing them in order to write them correctly and give a little background about their structure and history. The characters for these videos were selected based on my character frequency research starting from the most frequent one. You can find more information about my character frequency study here.

In the future, I would like to do more videos like this on Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and other langauges as well. I would also like to record interviews with other fellow language learners and post them on my channel.

Hope you enjoy the channel and if you the videos useful, feel free to subscribe.

Vladimir

Chinese character frequency list - Interview articles

Abstract

In this study I tried to analyze the Chinese character composition of about 60  interview articles in two Taiwanese online magazines,  evaluate the data, produce a character frequency chart, character knowledge vs text recognition chart, do absolute character prediction calculations and compare the data with previous analyses that I have done. I sampled a total of 45 235 characters and found that there was a total of 1865 unique characters in this sample. Based on my calculations I also found that in order to recognize 100% (using the word 'to recognize' and not 'to understand' on purpose throughout the article) of any given number of interview articles, one needs to know 2084 unique Chinese characters. When comparing this data to my previous news character analyses I found, that the interview character frequency list contains much more direct speech elements than the news article character frequency one does and I've mathematically proven, that interview articles are easier to read for beginner and intermediate students of Mandarin Chinese than news articles are.

Introduction


In the past posts I was trying to analyze the frequency of words and characters based on the data that I sampled over the period of 6 weeks from 4 section of Taiwanese news (please see the Character frequency analysis, Word frequency analysis and Character prediction analysis articles for more information). 

Basic language structures project

Listen to MP3

Podcast transcription:

Hello this is Vladimir, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. It‘s been a very long time since I did a recording for my podcast and it’s been quite a while since I wrote an article as well and so I decided that this has to end that I have to dedicate more time to my blog and my podcast.

There were several reasons for not writing and not doing recordings, mostly because since the last time I wrote an article which was probably sometime in March or April - since then we’ve been having wonderful weather and I just felt bad whenever I spent time inside. And another reason probably is also the fact that it takes me a lot of time to come up with an interesting topic and something that I personally think would be worth writing an article about, let alone to do a recording about and it takes a lot of time to work on the article itself, to work out the details and if it's recording it takes a lot of time to work on the recording so that it looks good and sounds good. So whenever I was out in the beautiful weather and I was thinking that should go back and work on the recordings I just sort of postponed and postponed basically until now.

Kending 墾丁and the National museum of marine biology 國立海洋生物博物館

I've been in Taiwan for almost three years now and although I've tried to be more active in my local travels lately, I've never made it to the famous beaches in the south of the island which are scattered around the small town called Kending (墾丁). In general, beaches in Taiwan are not what you would expect from a tropical island since Taiwan is an island of volcanic origin and the only  postcard-type beaches can be found in the south. 

I left Taipei on a sunny and humid Sunday morning. It wasn't 9 am yet and the temperature was already at 35 degrees. I took the High speed rail at the Taipei main station and after about 90 minutes arrived in Gaoxiong (高雄), which is the second largest city in Taiwan. From there I took a bus called the "Kending express" which after about an hour of a pretty sound ride arrived at the National museum of marine biology (國立海洋生物博物館), which is roughly 20 km away from Kending.