171 sats \ 19 replies \ @Undisciplined 6 Aug \ on: Learn Chinese with Sensei #2: 自由人 ideasfromtheedge
I've long wondered how your dictionaries are organized. We have a phonetic alphabet, with only a couple dozen characters. It's easy enough to put words in alphabetical order.
My understanding is that there are thousands of Chinese characters and some are not widely known. If you come across an unfamiliar character, how do you look up its meaning?
The Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language has a set of phonetic characters, called Zhu Yin (注音) that can sound out every possible character. So dictionaries pre-CCP are organized using the phonetic set. The idea is probably that if you can speak the language and know the phonetic set, you can find the character. Also Mandarin was used because it was the most commonly and widely spoken / understood dialect.
The post CCP dictionaries that I used from China when I was a kid were organized according to Pin Yin (拼音). The CCP mapped the phonetic characters to the English alphabet, and the characters are organized according to alphabetical order based on each word's phonetic representation. The idea is the same, if you can sound out the character, you can find the character.
There is often also a prefix in the dictionary that has all the characters organized according to the "stem" of the character, we call 部首, then the remaining strokes to complete the word. Each character's page is listed in the dictionary. That way, if you run into a word you don't know how to say and don't know its meaning, you can look it up by "stem" plus stroke. See pic below.
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Ok, so the part I was missing is that even though Mandarin characters are not necessarily phonetic, there are phonetic rules that tell the reader how an unfamiliar character should sound.
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Characters are unified amongst dialects, but pronunciation is different. Different characters could sound different or similar or same under different dialects. There are also specific characters that are only used by certain dialects.
The zhuyin / pinyin system is the phonetic symbols / alphabet plus rules to sound out every character in Mandarin. Then there are many many dialects in China, some with more tones and some with less tones etc etc.
The Chinese language is all so complicated...
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I didn’t know about 注音! I only learnt 拼音 in school.
Am I right to assume that people in Taiwan use 注音 to piece together a sentence, find a word, etc?
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Zhuyin was a KMT project and Pinyin was a CCP project. That is why Taiwan still teaches Zhuyin. I don't believe there was a standard phonetics system during the empire days. I could be wrong though and please correct me if I am.
Simplified Chinese is also a CCP project; a project that I personally don't really like, because I think the traditional characters look better and still has their roots coming from the hieroglyphs.
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This relates to my question. #637190
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I asked one of my Chinese friends this in grad school, but his English wasn't great and I was never able to understand his answer.
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It's a good question, I'd never thought of it. It's best to wait for an answer from locals. 🤠
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Characters are composed of two parts. The radical and the phonetic part.
There are about 200 radicals.
Back when I learned Chinese, it was the pre-tablet era, and traditional characters were organized by radical... so I used to look up the characters by first looking up the radical and then search from there after adding the phonetic part to it. The phonetic subdivision was based on the number of strokes with the characters with the least number of strokes coming first.
But best to let a local confirm. There might have been other ways to organize dictionaries that I am not aware of.
Nowadays of course, you can just write it on the screen of your tablet and it'll recognize it.
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Thanks. Wouldn't Korean script follow the same logic?
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Korean is completely different. The Korean alphabet is phonetic with 24 letters and can be learned in a few hours.
That being said, a subset of Chinese characters were part of the written word in Korea for a long time. Now kids don't have to learn them anymore.
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Interesting, a Korean friend of mine told me it was similar enough to Chinese that he could read some Chinese writing. Of course there's a good chance he was just having some fun at my expense.
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Both @south_korea_ln and @gnilma have given excellent responses. To add on, I like to use the pin yin (phonetic representation) of the character. Let’s say 自 (zi). I dive straight to the zi portion of the dictionary. Then, because Mandarin has four tones, I will then search for this word 自 via its tone (zì). It will take me about a minute to find a word that I am more or less acquainted with.
In regard to obscure words whose readings I don’t know, I used to scan them with an app. Then, I extracted the unfamiliar vocabulary and pasted them onto the search bar for Google to figure out the phonics. Only then can I use the phonetic reading to get the meaning of the unfamiliar word. It’s quite troublesome - and I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I have stopped learning new words. I blame it on parenting haha
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Isn't the same way than for every dictionary? Rolling dices and check the resulting index until it matches the word you're looking for. I mean.. how else could it be?
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Somehow I imagine you rolling dices n smoking cigars haha
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The cigar helps to cope, this searching method can be a little time consuming...
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That's not how phonetic alphabet dictionaries work. We have an arbitrary order of the characters that everyone learns as a child. From there, it's perfectly predictable where a word will be in the dictionary.
I'm asking this question because they have characters that people are unfamiliar with and would therefor not know the order of.
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But then how you do with the dices?
..I was just trolling :P
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As far as I know, they do have to use dice, but probably not.
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