Memory
Thursday 22nd June
After posting the 64 Chinese characters I’d learned on Tuesday evening, I was asked “I’m impressed - but how many of the 64 stayed learned???”
Well, I tried writing them all this morning from my worksheets and the answer is… 57 characters, two half-characters and a duh.
The four characters I didn’t remember were:
错 cùo - bad, used in 不错 not bad!
谁 shéi - who?
做 zùo - do, make
板 bǎn, part of 老板 lǎo bǎn - boss.
The two half-characters were:
师 shī. I remembered the left half, but not the right. I also didn’t remember that I had a memory aid for this - it’s part of 老师 lǎo shī - teacher - and I had an image of a teacher dancing with a mortar board (look at the right half - it almost works) with a knife in his hand (because the left half is the symbol for a knife).
说 shūo - speak, say. Another one I had a memory aid for, but forgot. The left part (which I got) is the radical for speaking. My memory aid sees the right half as a TV set on legs with an old-fashioned two-part antenna. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help if I don’t remember I have the memory aid!
The duh is:
老 lǎo - part of 老板 lǎo bǎn - boss and 老师 lǎo shī teacher. It’s a duh because I actually wrote the whole character, but at half its proper width and then couldn’t remember the right half of it. That’s mostly because there isn’t a right half!
I think I’ll stick with my 26 character language, much easier to remember
Code Monkey
22 Jun 06 at 9:31 am
but you have to put so many of them together to make words full stop
donapostrophet forget upper hyphen case letters toofull stop that makes fifty hyphen two charactersfull stop
and what about the numerals question mark that makes it digit six digit two characters full stop punctuation and accents left parenthesis cafe acute comma nai dieresisve right parenthesis futher add to the list full stop
i wonder how many characters there really are in english usage ellipsis
this post has been brought to you by a twenty six character writing system full stop
stu
22 Jun 06 at 9:42 am
I bet you can’t translate from Finnish into Chinese;-)
Lordhutton
22 Jun 06 at 10:06 am
You’ve not been paying attention hutters
stu
22 Jun 06 at 10:08 am
Chinesse looks a really difficult language to learn, but I bet its fun when you get the hang of bits. But why Chinesse??? I’d prefer Japanesse as I’m more like to visit that country than China…. not that I think I’ll ever get the chance to visit ether but fingers crossed..
Mr Hedgehog
22 Jun 06 at 12:27 pm
I already have survival Japanese, Mr. H. I hadn’t tried a tonal language before which is why (I think) I went for Chinese this time.
Plus, China will be a major player in the world before too long (if it isn’t already), and Chinese might actually be useful.
stu
22 Jun 06 at 12:45 pm
I guess another thing is that we have the local Oriental Food Shop which has free chinese newpapers and the lady behind the counter speaks Mandarin.
There’s a lot of crossover between Japanese and Chinese, and I’ll probably pick up Japanese again before too long to improve it more.
stu
22 Jun 06 at 12:46 pm
I thought japanese was slightly tonal?
I’m gutted about everyone learning mandarin… EVEryone know Cantonese is the REAL chinese
sweavo
22 Jun 06 at 1:11 pm
Japanese is mostly monotonic with some tone to give nuance - like English.
I dabbled with Cantonese first, but the 6(?) tones put me off. It was a tricky choice deciding between Mandarin and Cantonese (and all the other dialects), but I figured the ‘official’ language of Beijing, Taiwan and Singapore would be more useful than one albeit more common abroad, but less used back at home. Also Mandarin should be a good base for many other dialects.
stu
22 Jun 06 at 1:19 pm
Indeed, Mandarin is the best choice according to my Chinese colleague (who speaks Mandarin, natch). She sneers at Cantonese as being an inferior language.
Carol
22 Jun 06 at 6:50 pm
I’m even more impressed now. I used to find my brain played tricks on me, characters I could easily recognise and therefore thought I “knew” would come out backwards or otherwise garbled when I tried to write them from memory! (I don’t have the problem now because I don’t even try). I have a series of booklets published by the Singapore Times called Fun With Characters that provides some memory aids - hence my interest in only those characters that are the same in Japanese and Chinese. Many years ago it pleased me enormously to be able to read the Chinese characters for “Middle Kingdom” (for an exhibition on China), solely because they are the same in Japanese - and also among the simplest characters to remember anyway.
qaminante
22 Jun 06 at 10:43 pm