Understanding Chinese Characters

Learn to recognize 70% of Chinese characters you encounter in a few weeks.

Maybe you want to learn Chinese characters but don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you’ve started studying Chinese characters but found them difficult to remember. Or maybe you would like to have deeper knowledge about Chinese characters that is historically accurate but not overly academic.

Understanding Chinese Characters helps you understand Chinese characters for what they really are, combining the best modern Chinese character academic research with the best learner experience.

This book will give you a firm foundation in how Chinese characters are put together so that you have a deep understanding not only of the characters in the book but also countless other characters that you are likely to come across. You won’t be memorizing endless mnemonics to master each character—you’ll understand how each character sounds and what it means, based on its structure and history.

Books about Chinese characters are either very difficult to read, because they've been written by researchers and are not intended for the everyday learner, or are very reader-friendly and appealing like Chineasy, but are also very imprecise, incomplete, impractical and just frustrating.

Understanding Chinese Characters is easy to read and yet as accurate as the latest academic research allows.

Word sculpting

What is word sculpting?

Word sculpting is a way of learning words from top to bottom, slowly removing layers of difficulty on all levels. I started calling it like this for the lack of a better name, but it is pretty accurate actually. 

Imagine you're somewhere at a beginner - intermediate level in Mandarin Chinese and you'd like to learn the Mandarin word for 'situation'.

You ask your friend and they say the word situation in Mandarin is: qíng kuàng

You could either stress your brain and try to remember everything about the word perfectly on your first try - every sound, every aspiration, intonation, tones, word usage etc., or you could break the process down into steps:

Relax and just remember whatever you can in the first step. Lets say, you will only remember that there is an 'i' in the first word and an 'a' in the second:

Step 1: .i.. ..a..

The next time you have to say the word maybe you'll have an easy time recalling the 'i' and the 'a' and in addition you will think: Oh yeah, the first syllable started with an aspirated q sound:

Step 2: qi.. ..a..

List of UN country names in Chinese and their meanings

Recently I made a video which was a part of my Experimental Chinese videocourse teaching Mandarin Chinese without characters and without tones to complete beginners and someone asked a question about the story behind the word 美国 (the Chinese name for USA) in the comments. A discussion followed and since I love etymology, I thought it would be a good idea to write an article about the names of all countries in Chinese. (All UN member countries to be precise)

There are 4 types of country names in Chinese:

1. Names that have a meaning in Chinese (中國，日本，冰島)
2. Phonetic transcripts with no meaning in Chinese (斯洛伐克，捷克）
3. Names that are a combination of 1. and 2. （ 安地卡及巴布達， 白俄羅斯）
4. Abbreviations 
1. Abbreviations of longer 2. type country names（印尼， 阿根廷）
2. Abbreviations of longer 3. type country names（美國，德國，法國，澳洲 etc.)

1. Names that have a meaning in Chinese

中国  China (Zhōngguó)

中 means 'center' and 国 means 'country'. The most common way of translating this name is Middle kingdom, it is however not entirely correct. The term 中国 originally referred to kingdoms (plural) on the central Chinese plain in Ancient China that were collectively related to each other through the same Ancient Chinese culture and related languages. Equally, they were labeled Central kingdoms as opposed to the barbarian states and nations around them. Only later the name shifted from Central kingdoms to Middle kingdom.

Experimental Chinese - Lesson 1 | No characters, no tones

Translation

Hi, hello,
I am a Law school student,
My name is Wang Yinghong,
but you can call me A Hong.

Vocabulary

Hai = hi
ni hao = hello
wo = me, I
shi = to be
falü xi = department of law, law school
de = apostrophe "s", of the kind
jiao = to call
jiu keyi le = it's good like that

One of the reasons why Mandarin Chinese is so difficult to learn is that there are too many things students have to deal with as beginners. We have the structure of the language which is very difficult in itself, but then in addition to that, there is the very challenging pronunciation, especially tones, Chinese characters, a ton of words students have to learn, unpredictable syntax, cultural aspects of the language etc. All of this makes the language very challenging. It's almost as if a person who's never been to the gym before would be asked to benchpress 150 Kg on their first try.

Top 150 most useful frequent nouns

The following is the list of the top 150 most frequent, most common and most useful nouns to learn when learning a foreign language and its Italian translation.

It is based on about 5 different vocabulary frequency lists and my personal word lists which contain words that were occurring organically when I was learning languages from scratch or improving the languages I knew (Persian, Serbian, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Hungarian, French). This list contains only the most important nouns from all of these lists, that give you most language coverage, re-arranged so that they would roughly be ordered from the most useful, most general ones downwards.

I also worked on English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian (Cyrillic and Latin), Slovak, Hungarian and a Romance combo noun frequency list.

Buy other noun lists here

Learning to code and language learning parallels

Recently I started to learn how to use the programing language Python. Language learning and learning how to code are two different skill sets but are connected in many ways - not the least in that you need to ‘learn’ both.

Key takeaways from learning how to start using the programing language Python that can be used in learning how to start using a real language too (absolute beginner level):

• Learn from top to bottom. (Start with the general idea, don’t get lost in small details)
• Learn in small chunks
• First see/hear the chunk, then read about it. (First see the small chunk in use, then read about the theory/listen to the explanation related to it. )
• Learn by looking at someone who already knows the things/concepts you need to learn = work with a teacher
• It's very frustrating and takes forever to work yourself through whatever course/tutorial/manual you can find to get to what you actually need. A teacher sitting next to you is absolutely crucial for lightning speed progress
• Analyze how your teacher uses the concepts you need to learn until you realize what's going on = reach an aha! moment
• Practice your small Aha! moment chunks until they become automatic
• Review so you: 1. don’t forget 2. store the chunks deeper and deeper into your automatic memory
• Move on to another chunk and repeat the above
• Build on aha! chunks: combine, substitute, and then repeat the automation process
• Only learn chunks that are absolutely necessary (or are an integral part of what you need)
• Learn by looking at practical examples
• Copy something someone already did and adjust it to your needs.
• Your time is precious: only look for explanations or work with teachers who know what you’re trying to learn. Look for explanations that are short and effective and explained by someone who has invested their time in making sure the student understands what the teacher is saying and is making real progress. Avoid explanations and teachers who only lump everything they know onto the student, having the student deal with the whole lump on their own
• Rant: Stay far away from teachers whose main concern is to manifest their ego by showing you how intelligent they are and not to make sure you actually make real progress :)
• To teachers:
• Explain only that what is necessary - do not deviate away from the explanation, don’t explain alternatives, exceptions, other possible functions, the history of this or that thing.. only if absolutely necessary
• Every time you can, explain using things the student can relate to (use metaphors, known concepts, real life examples etc.)
• Use as little unknown concepts and unknown or difficult words in your explanation as you can
• Show instead of explain
• When explaining something, don’t talk about all possible ways of doing/saying this or that particular thing. Don’t even say there is another possibility of doing so. It will only confuse/add options which a beginner will find overwhelming. Talk only about your one most preferred way or the way most people prefer.

Fitness

A lot of people have been asking me about my fitness, diet, daily routines, travel and just random things which I love to talk about so I thought why not make what 1000 people do every day and start a podcast:) If you'd have a specific topic you would like me to talk about just leave a comment, these recordings are really a lot of fun to make, I'll try to make my best to be consistent if you guys like it.



iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vladimir-skultety-podcast/id1202514702?mt=2

How to learn a foreign language fast and well - short answer

A Slovak journalist once asked me to write a short paragraph about how to learn English fast and well. It is very difficult to summarize something like that into a few sentences, but I tried. Very simply put, learning a foreign language can be compared to learning how to play a guitar. If you want to learn how to play a guitar fast and well, you need two things (except for the guitar obviously):

• spend a lot of time listening to someone who plays the guitar well 

and

• spend a lot of time practicing. 

In the world of foreign languages, this translates into:

• a lot of input (listening and reading) 

and

• a lot of output (speaking and writing). 

The approach of a beginner and an intermediate student will be different of course, but the learning philosophy remains the same.

Interview for Refresher.sk about languages, books, movies and other things

There’s a saying which goes “The more languages you know the more you are a person”. Based on this saying, Vladimir Skultety would probably have quite a lot of personalities. He belongs to a group of people which are called polyglots. He knows more languages, than is typical for one single person to know. On his blog he says, he speaks 15, half of them fluently. He became known after he posted a video on YouTube, where he spoke in even more - nineteen languages. He told us why he chose such an exotic hobby and what it feels like to be a polyglot. 

Could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

I’m 33 years old and I come from Kosice, Slovakia. I have a Master’s degree in International relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese studies. I work as an interpreter of English, Mandarin Chinese and Slovak and currently work on a book about Chinese characters. I’ve lived in Taiwan for five years, in the USA for two years and have spent longer periods of time in the Czech republic, Italy and Austria.

How a video goes viral

A short video explaining how a video goes viral.

Last year I made a video which reached 1.5 million views and I thought I would make a video explaining how and why it happened.

If you like the video, feel free to comment, share or subscribe.