21 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 6 Aug \ parent \ on: Learn Chinese with Sensei #2: 自由人 ideasfromtheedge
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.
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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