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The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes.
This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).
This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…
Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…
So 天真 (tiānzhēn), along the same lines, roughly translated, means "then sense of reality that you have when you are born or which you are gifted by nature", unsophisticated and naive. Don't know if that makes sense, but I've always thought about these two words together and felt like I understood them better through context.
This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…
> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…
Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept doesn't exist in English, except for measure words which serve a different purpose.
For Korean there are around 30-35 or so [2] used in common speech I believe, with 개 being a general catch all for objects. Other examples include: One has to use 명 or 분 for people, and 달 or 개월 for months (duration).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word
Earlier quoted context omitted.
English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey mean…
>There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.
None of those turn into completely different words based on which tone you use to pronounce it; a person would still know what you mean based on the sentence context but it would sound off.
It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…
天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.
One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app) The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes. This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI…
Beginner learners often write ㅁ wrong, making it almost look like a ㅇ.
One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app) The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes. This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI…
> In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too
Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…
Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages. Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept does…
You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書).
Sure, you can make distinctions between "classifiers" vs. "measure words" vs. units of measurement, but it feels like the same construct to say 一位人 ("one person"), 一群人 ("a group of people") or 一斤人 ("half a kilo of human"), as grisly as the last one may be.