--What I found frustrating:
- I started the study of Chinese three years ago. As you may guess, I am still learning. I intend to turn this to your benefit as I still vividly remember my first steps and the frustrations I encountered along the way. If you find them strangely similar to yours, my hope is that I can help you.
My focus here is in learning how to read and write. I have the greatest respect for those who strive to master Mandarin but I can only help you if you want to go beyond purely oral communication skills.
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- My first impression then, and I have looked into several teaching methods, is that they emphasize the two extremes of written language, words for their direct role in carrying what is meant and strokes as the necessary means of writing what is said. Unfortunately it turns the task of learning written Chinese communication into a tremendous exercise in rote memorization.
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- There is some truth to it. If you travel from New York to San Francisco, no matter what you do, you will have to cover thousand of miles. No matter what you do, learning Chinese requires the memorization of a huge amount of visual information. But don't you find those who today boast of having crossed the American continent on foot a bit out of step with the times? Yet once they reach fluency, far too many Chinese readers consider going on foot as they had to do such a proof of character they expect the same stamina from you. I cannot promise you my insights will make you fly. But would not putting your hands, and feet, on a good bicycle already be a considerable improvement over a pedestrian trial?
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- Here is the bicycle I built along the way and my frustration when I found how much faster, had I been given one in New York, I could have travelled the distance I have covered todate. Mind! my bicycle is not complete yet and work remains to be done to improve teaching Chinese by using my frame. But read on for you may find even my rudimentary prototype can help you.
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--Markers will make you master Chinese:
- When lost among a crowd of Chinese, a foreigner feels "they all look the same". This is not a stereotype, it's a logical reaction to see similarity when it exists. Chinese lost in some midwestern, midsized city in the United States will have the same impression. In the same way a Chinese text appears to the beginner as a crowd of characters, looking all the same. Aren't they all made of a jumble of strokes?
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- When a high school teacher meets a new class, he or she may ask of a new student "aren't you the brother / sister of such and such?". I have been such a brother myself and wondered how a stranger to our family could spot the resemblance. What could make me so visibly closer to my brother than to my classmates? Of course my last name is a giveaway. Yet the same happened with unprompted strangers. What they are able to do is to analyze faces into their component features. Markers, not strokes, are the features of Chinese characters.
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- I have not invented markers. Radicals, a selected subset of all markers, have been used to organize Chinese dictionaries for more than five hundred years. Good teachers and recent teaching methods regularly detail new characters into their components rather than directly into strokes.
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- But, the source of my frustration, current approaches use markers as a curiosity for nice asides rather than an indispensable instrument. And radicals are but an artifact of the past with little modern relevance. Why? Because the issue with markers has always been their sheer number, between one to two thousands. Without current computer technologies, the decisions to treat markers as a curiosity and focus on some small, special set made sense. No more. Each marker is but a click away.
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- Each marker generates a family, made of the characters where they appear. The principle behind my bicycle is to provide a home for each family. Learn the address of each Chinese character and you can apply the two contradictory yet complementary tools of memorization, resemblance and difference. Resemblance emphasizes natural groups, "these three are obvious siblings and live at the same address". Difference focuses on the telling detail, "Peter is the taller of the two brothers and Mary has long hair".
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- Each character belongs to one or more families, one per each of its component markers. Married and living in America, Amanda and Kevin are similarly known to visit Amanda's family for Thanksgiving and go to Kevin's home at Christmas.
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--The 3 "S"'s of Chinese marker families: shape, sound and sense:
- The fundamental characteristic of a marker is its unique shape, 行, 合,
 . While the latter case shows a marker does not necessarily exist as a stand alone character, most started life that way. In turn most exceptions, whether past ones like 氵or recent ones like , came along as a way to abbreviate a character shape into composition, 水 for 氵and 巠 for , and thus create a new marker.
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- Do not be fooled by character stroke order. Sometimes a marker shape is obscured by the fact its strokes are not penned in succession. Yet once you see the shape, you will have no trouble recognizing it, like 行 and 圭 in 街 or 禾 and 北 in 乘.
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- Do not be fooled by the way dictionaries use the basic strokes, 丶, 一, 丨, 丿, 乙, as radicals. They do it because by construction most markers are self contained shapes which do not contain another marker, let alone a radical. Basic strokes are but an expedient way to index them nevertheless.
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- As soon as you have come accross a few markers, you will be confused by how close they can look alike even though you know they represent different families. Line up their mugshots and spot the essential difference. Still under development, my visual table of all marker shapes may already help you distinguish 礻from 衤, 手 from 毛 or 免 from 奂
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- While the presence of this shape marks a character as a family member, what makes the family useful is that all its members share far more than the shape they have in common, either in sound or sense or both. The rare exceptions to this rule correspond to graphical confusions made by past scholars. Is your name 陈 for instance? This is because, in its traditional form 陳, the marker for sound "chen" was 申, also pronounced "shen". Unfortunately, superimposed on a character composed of 阝and 木, a palisade of trees, to result in 陳, this marker was mistaken for 東, the sun 日 rising behind a tree 木, denoting the East (dong1), now simplified as 东. Allow time to hallow this rare error, that's the spirit.
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- One reason markers have been traditionally dismissed is that sound resemblances conveyed by markers are just that, resemblances, rather than identity. Yet isn't memory helped when finding a family phonetic gene at work behind 工 (gōng, work), 红 (hóng, red) and 空 (kōng, empty)? Not only the three characters rhyme but the initial consonants g, k and h are closely related. My bicycle is such that its presentation organizes phonetic resemblances so as to maximize them. See my methodology for more details or simply use the C3S site incomplete as it stands.
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- Conversely single sounds signal certain markers. Again expect in general the association to be one to many, such as 工, 弓, 公, 共 for "gong". This is about average and, compensating for hopeless cases such as "ji", you will savor sounds represented by single markers like "fang" (方) and "gei" (合). In the latter case, knowing how it sounds means you already know half of how to write the character.
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- Radicals are said to share sense with their family members. While often the case, this is neither always true, 其 is purely phonetic in 期, nor a privilege reserved to radicals. More accurately each time, radical or not, a marker carries semantic meaning, it helps memorization tremendously especially when it also marks phonetics. For instance often connotes a "supporting base" as well as the sounds jing/qing. Hence 茎 (jīng) is the stem of a plant, 经 (jīng) is, among other things, the warp of a cloth, 氢 (qīng) stands for hydrogen, the base element.
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--What should you do?:
- First and foremost follow your teacher or your teaching method. My bicycle is not ready to get you to San Francisco on your own power. But it does not mean you should ignore what I have discovered if it could be of help to you and please feel free to share this with your teacher.
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- My advice is that while it would be foolish to start learning markers and their families in a systematic way - who learn Chinese by reading a dictionary? - it would be equally foolish to waste the effort you make each time you memorize a character. When you do so, always ask yourself what markers it is composed of and, if it is already online, to look up each of their families to find out more about them.
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- This way you will recognize them when they reappear. For instance 乜. reappears rapidly even for a beginner, in 乜(yě - also), 他 (tā - he), 她 (tā - she), 地 as "dì" (ground) and again as "de" (adverbial suffix), all in the same family, in the instance indicating phonetic similarity as d, t and "y" can be seen as dentals. And what does it cost even the beginner to learn that the pronouns 牠 (tā) and 祂 (tā) respectively apply to beasts and God, free from gender? In fact it provides a leg up on learning two new radicals, 牛 (the ox) and 礻(to venerate).
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- If you let yourself carried by markers, you organize your memory, you sharpen your vision and finally you can play games. Games are allowed, indeed welcome to help memory even if they are not based on reality as long as you remember it is just a prop. For example denotes both a sound group jin/jing/qing/ting and a supporting base, but not always. If asked to support a cart, I would not think it light, yet light is 轻 (qīng).
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- The border between memory props and real scholarship is actually far from fixed. While visibly phonetic, quite a few markers seem to retain some semantic influence. Am I dreaming that 乜 (de/di/chi/shi/ta/tuo/ye) conveys a sense of "an instance of" (he, she, it, a plot of earth, a body of water, also), 佥 (jian/lian/qian/xian/yan) a sense of "collection" or "covering" inherited from 亼, or 肖 (qiao/shao/xiao/xie) a sense of "decrease" from
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- Suppose now you come upon 消防. 肖 sounds somewhat like xiao, 方 like fang. 方 often denotes "place", 阝"defense",肖 "disparition" and 氵"water". Do not these four markers give you enough clues to help you read "fire brigade", xiāofáng, the place for defending [people by making danger, aka fire,] disappear under water? Conversely, suppose you want to write xiāofáng, knowing it means "fire brigade". Wouldn't what precedes help 消防 engrave itself in your memory? It did the trick for me. See you next in San Francisco. Together we'll wait for the pedestrians.
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- Finally here is a freebie for those of you who are using a dictionary, especially the Pocket Oxford dictionary.
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--Feedback:
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December 2014 |