Thread: Reading Chinese characters

Hi

Bearing in mind that I have no experience in any form of Chinese whatsoever, I hope you will forgive me for asking a potentially ridiculous question. All the European and Slavonic languages have some form of alphabet -and in addition to all of these, Japanese does, too, even though there are effectively four alphabets in Japanese. My question is this - as there does not seem to be an "alphabet" in Chinese (of course, correct me if I'm wrong) how do you read the characters? Is it a case of learning basic ones and learning additional sounds as the characters acquire additional meanings through, perhaps, the addition of new characters onto basic ones? Or is it a case of memorising how every single Chinese character is pronounced, with no correlation at all between what the character looks like and how it's pronounced? I realise that there would be no way around learning stroke order, how to write the characters themselves, and something I have a very vague idea about called "tone", though.

Any explanation at all would be fascinating. If anyone could provide examples through actual Chinese characters or pinyin, that would, of course, be even better! Thanks

Jack

I studied the reading for awhile and I'm no expert but basically you have to rote memorize every character; there's no corellation between meaning and how they look, let alone what tone is involved. It's brutal, I gave up.

Wow, that sounds fascinating, actually, even if it does sound extremely difficult. What was your motivation for looking at it in the first place, sperk? If I were ever going to learn to read Chinese, I would want to read it so that I could read about a particular part of Chinese history which has caught my attention in recent years. There was a novel written based around this particular part of Chinese history (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by someone called Luo Guanzhong) You can read about it on Wikipedia, if it interests you - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of ... e_kingdoms - I learnt a bit about it because I used to play a computer game based around it, which I believe it also mentions in that article.

Thanks for your answer, sperk.

Jack

Originally Posted by sperk

there's no corellation between meaning and how they look

Not so. There are no correlations between sounds and forms, but there are between meanings and forms, not quite obvious, of course.

Originally Posted by JackBoni

Wow, that sounds fascinating, actually, even if it does sound extremely difficult. What was your motivation for looking at it in the first place, sperk? If I were ever going to learn to read Chinese, I would want to read it so that I could read about a particular part of Chinese history which has caught my attention in recent years. There was a novel written based around this particular part of Chinese history (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by someone called Luo Guanzhong) You can read about it on Wikipedia, if it interests you - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of ... e_kingdoms - I learnt a bit about it because I used to play a computer game based around it, which I believe it also mentions in that article.

Thanks for your answer, sperk.

Jack

Where I work there are a lot of Chinese so it was to communicate with them that I learned what I know of Chinese. I used pinyin which is much easier. It would be hard to penetrate deeply into the language with learning to read but I don't have the motivation. I've heard of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms though I've never read it. I think it would take a good 7-10 yrs of studying characters before you could tackle something like that. You could always give it a try and see if you like it.

I intend to read it in English first. I have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment, as, although my Russian is poor by comparison to many of the very talented people on these forums, my Russian is "very good" when compared to other people on my course. We're tackling very simple texts at the moment, and so I have time to push ahead on my Russian, and pursue any other interests I have in other areas.

I am aware that learning characters would be a very daunting task, but I also think that I would enjoy it. I like the challenge. Delog, thank you for your clarification

Jack

English spelling is a little like Chinese. You have to rote learn the pronunciation for many of our "characters" if you consider a character to be one word. For example (all you Russians will be fully aware of this horrible situation):
rough
through
thorough
bough
brought
and for giggles
caught