The 又 in 友

[Gharial]

Just thought you guys might like a peek (and maybe a laugh!) at the snippet of my "analytic dictionary" (to rival Karlgren's?(sh)) that relates to the discussion on this thread.

It's very rough, nowhere near succinct enough yet, and very much a work in progress still (hence the lack of definite entry numbers for a start!), but hey, it keeps me busy and might help me at least to learn some more, be able to review, build further etc!

Subentries (phonetic ~), prefaced by >, are arranged according to the stroke count and order of each CASS radical additional to the phonetic; technically unrelated characters however, like that 左 , are (as in the attached jpeg) probably best coming at the end of rather than "graphically interrupting" the phonetic chains, and being marked with a ! or whatever.

Mnemonics are enclosed in double speech marks, with underlines referring to previously learnt names for CASS radicals, and bold marking the keyword that the mnemonic as a whole is trying to establish. Italics refer back to a mnemonic key that has been established in a previous entry. I might change things around a bit though (e.g. just mark all previously taught stuff in italics, and have bold and/or underline for just the new keywords), 'cos I'm not entirely sure about the current highlighting (i.e. it's probably not achieving quite the right emphases)..

The index is arranged by total strokes and then sub-sorted by first stroke type (dian, heng, shu, pie and ...gou). So you could look up characters just ("simply"?) by phonetic (or rather by apparent phonetic - Edit: That's how the title of the index in the jpeg ought to have been phrased, as 'Index of apparent phonetics by stroke count') rather than by radical + residue. I'll add an alphabetical index also (which'll be easy enough to do) that'll enable those who can guess the rough pronunciation of a character to find it quicker, or those who want to browse the phonetics alphabetically to do so.

Obviously it isn't a dictionary full and proper (re. the 'etc' at 有) but a more "sparse" listing of essentially individual characters in what will hopefully be a reasonably brisk and learnable order. Compounds don't therefore get much of a look in unless the characters within them seem very bound together and/or there is something to note with certain common compounds (for example, that '友 is toneless in 朋友 péngyou, friend').

Edited April 3, 2010 at 03:13 AM by Gharial