Learning individual characters

[Ludens]

I'd like to discuss learning individual characters (in addition to compound words). When I'm learning a compound word that includes a characters unknown to me, I learn both the meaning of the word and the individual character(s). This means I make separate Anki cards for the compound word and all of it's individual characters.

While a lot of the time I feel that this helps me remember and understand the compound words better, I'm not sure if it's worth the time and trouble it costs to remember individual characters of which I'm not sure if they are ever used on their own.

Another difficulty seems to be the dictionary definitions for most individual characters, which tend to be numerous and sometimes pretty vague. I'm not sure how to deal with characters that have 26 definitions.

I'm still just starting to learn Chinese, so I'm not sure how many of these individual characters will pop up as actual (non-compound) words in the future, but as long as they don't, learning them is harder than learning actual words because it's always learned out of context. On the other hand, I do think learning them makes learning actual words easier in the future.

Any thoughts and/or experiences?

[gegehuhu]

Ludens,

I think your question is a good one.

My own advice is to not bother learning the isolated individual characters on their own.

Just learn the words for now.

As you correctly surmised, individual characters very rarely get used in isolation, this goes for both spoken and written Chinese.

Instead, just focus on learning words and the characters inside them in the context of those words.

As you continue to learn Chinese, you will discover that in fact these characters do show up again and again in other words.

I've been studying Chinese for two years now, and I'm always discovering new words that use characters I learned a long time ago.

I think the cognitive act of making these connections between different words that share the same characters is actually much more valuable than learning the characters' meaning on its own.

I do have one tool that is a bit like learning individual characters.

In addition to lists of all the words I've learned, I keep a spreadsheet of all the characters I've learned.

Every time I learn a new word that uses that character, I go back to that character on my spreadsheet and add the new word.

For example, the character 计 I learned long ago in the word 设计。But over the last couple years I've also added 计算机, 计较, 会计, 估计, and 统计 to that character's section on the spreadsheet.

[Gharial]

You might like to take a look at the new ABC ECCE dictionary (or indeed the ABC C-E Comprehensive), which very usefully indicates whichever single-character entries in it are merely bound forms (i.e. occurring only with certain other characters) rather than meaningfully-independent characters, and directs the user to the appropriate compound entries (which are very easy to find thanks to the ABC's single-sort by full alphabetical [English ~ rather than entirely Pinyin ~] string, and its adoption of superscript numbers for indicating the relative frequency and thus order of entries identical in syllable and tone. Another obvious advantage of the frequency ordering is that you can be sure that the items and senses listed first are the more frequent and typical). I posted a detailed review of the ECCE a few months ago: http://www.chinese-f...post__p__237924

Another valuable reference work is Harbaugh's Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, which usually gives (in between the definitions for the single character, and the list of compounds that it heads) at least a few compounds in which the character isn't the head/initial character - see the items following each <-> (double-headed arrow symbol) on the pages at http://www.zhongwen.com . So it is in effect also a modest reverse-order dictionary, though there are of course more extensive listings of characters in non-initial position to be had in online dictionaries such as MDBG. Probably the main use of Harbaugh however is as a modern and accessible guide (compared to the somewhat dated style and appearance of stuff by Wieger, and Karlgren) to the traditional~popular "etymologies" (see the following for why that word's in scare quotes: http://languagelog.l...edu/nll/?p=2910 ) that have grown up around the characters.

But even if a character is ostensibly bound (at least in modern Chinese), I still think there is some value in trying to assign a core meaning or mnemonic (however vague) to it as a "single" character, because doing so can help you to "componentially" build up and recall the meaning of compounds and phrases (that is, holistic learning is all well and good, but it may not always work 100% or be powerful enough in the short term). The Japanese-English kanji dictionaries developed by Jack Halpern are one range that assigns usually a single keyword, a 'core meaning', to each character, and the range's flagship dictionary (the Kenkyusha/NTC New Japanese-English Character Dictionary: http://www.cjk.org/cjk/dicintro.html ) includes a very interesting appendical 'List of Kanji Synonym Groups' (i.e. a virtual kanji thesaurus!) that in the one place (though the information is repeated in the actual kanji entries in the dictionary itself) arranges and contrasts the kanji according to those keywords. Of course, one has to use Japanese learning materials with caution when using-adapting them for Chinese, but one additional useful feature of this particular dictionary is that is at least gives the Chinese hanzi equivalent (often simplified and/or slightly different to the Japanese kanji form) along with accompanying Pinyin transcription(s). Apparently there was a fully Chinese version of this dictionary in the pipeline, but AFAIK it hasn't yet materialized. Another kanji-related work that I've found quite useful is Foester & Tamura's Kanji ABC. (Online version of sorts here: http://www.kanjiabc....welcome;lang=EN ).

Hope the above resources help give you some ideas and pointers!

[jbradfor]

I find it can be useful to learn at least the pronunciation of the character by itself, as it makes it easier to use phonetic-based lookup in dictionaries.

[Ludens]

Thanks for the valuable contributions so far!

I'm still not entirely sure how to go about learning individual characters, but I'm now considering putting these individual characters in a separate SRS deck, and studying them from Chinese to English only. Not learning (and writing) them both ways will lighten my workload considerably while hopefully still retaining enough knowledge of individual characters. I think this approach could also help me to distinguish between characters and actual words.

One more question: do Chinese native speakers know (and/or have to study at school) the meanings of all characters?

Gharial, the ABC ECCE dictionary you mention could be very useful indeed, I've ordered a copy!

[Gharial]

Heh, glad to hear you've ordered the ABC ECCE, Ludens! I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it, and it's about the best and most affordable one-stop resource for Chinese now available, IMHO. (By the way, the latest Wenlin, the Chinese language-learning software package, now version 4 IIRC, includes the ABC ECCE and more, but may be a bit too expensive - I know that I for one can't really afford it at the moment!).

One more question: do Chinese native speakers know (and/or have to study at school) the meanings of all characters?

This is a bit like asking how long a piece of string is! Yin & Rohsenow (in their Modern Chinese Characters) try to provide an answer of sorts by quoting the totals included in various formal dictionaries, from the Shuowen Jiezi (c.100 AD, 9,353 characters) to the Hanyu Da Cidian (1986, 56,000 characters - dictionaries have obviously strived to become ever more comprehensive over time!). Y&R estimate that the number of characters still not included in dictionaries (e.g. those in certain colloquial expressions, or in dialects, or in place names) probably bring the total number of ancient and modern characters to around 60,000.

I'm a bit hazy on the prescribed list(s) for Chinese schooling (I'm more familiar with the Japanese), but I'd hazard a guess that they are either approximately the same as the Japanese (i.e. around 2,000 characters) or somewhat more extensive (i.e. in the region of 3-4,000 characters), and from what I recall, 2,000 characters is really only basic literacy in Chinese at least (i.e. you'll often need a dictionary by your side) whilst 4,000 will be helping you read more easily (that being said, there are doubtless the same sort of diminishing returns operating in Chinese as have been uncovered in English-based Corpus Linguistics: the first 1,000 words cover 90% of text, the next 1,000 for a total of 2,000 words cover 92%, then 3,000 only 92.5% etc [i made those figures up, but that is sort of how it goes]; on the other hand, infrequent items can be easier to learn due to their meaning and range of use being very small compared to say a common verb or grammatical particle. Anyway, do a search for 'Zipf's law' on Wiki etc to get a better idea of what I'm on about here ;)).

Ultimately, my personal cut-off point for characters is simple: if it isn't in the Xinhua dictionary (a true zidian, rather than a cidian), it's probably too rare and obselete to really be worrying about at all! Then there is the 1988 'List of Generally Used Characters in Modern Chinese' (现代汉语通用字表) which compared to 常用字(i.e. 'frequently used')-type lists effectively doubles the number of characters to 7,000.

Obviously native Chinese who aren't illiterate will know or be able to guess at more characters than the average westerner learning Chinese, but a lot depends on education level, so just as educated (university-level and above) English speakers will know potentially tens of thousands more words than the average English speaker, so will the educated Chinese speaker probably know thousands more characters than the more basically-schooled Chinese speaker. Paul Nation is one of the few authors I've read who's actually tried to estimate the size of native English speakers' vocabularies; then, there is that whole active-passive distinction (but which may sometimes be a bit of a dichotomy?).

One thing I absolutely LOVE about Y&R is its list of "dead", no-longer-used characters (apparently the majority) drawn from the 481 with the horse radical in the Kangxi dictionary, amongst which are these beauties (which I've had to supply componentially, due to them being unavailable in e.g. MDBG!): "a white horse with dark lips" (马+全), "a horse with dark lips" (马+粦), and "a yellow horse with dark lips" (马+呙) - all obviously VERY useful vocabulary, and just the sort of thing to get somebody you know isn't too enamoured of Chinese's eyes really bulging with rage!

But no, to be serious (and to tie in to the bound-form information contained in the ABC ECCE you'll hopefully be receiving very soon!), Y&R is great for stuff like the following (NB: Sorry about the large size. For a more easily-viewable onscreen size, it is probably easiest to simply save the jpegs to one's PC and view them independently of the forums!):

[Ludens]

Gharial, thanks again for the great information. I think I didn't make myself clear though (I may need to focus on learning English first, instead of Chinese:-)), as I wasn't trying to ask about the number of characters an average Chinese person knows.

Let my try again by quoting one of your attachments:

"the other category consists of characters such as 殖 ... which cannot be used alone as monosyllabic words, but only occur as components in polysyllabic words."

Do Chinese people know that 殖 means "to breed", although the character never occurs in isolation? If so, do they know / learn the definition of all individual characters they know as components of polysyllabic words?

[Gharial]

Well, you'd need to ask a Chinese person that question - as a Brit who has merely passable Chinese, I can (especially now that I'm no longer living in China) only really go by what my dictionaries tell me!*

I guess that that Chinese person (especially if they didn't speak much English) could certainly opt for the "compound paraphrase" approach: Zhe shi 'fanzhi/shengzhi/zhimindi' de 'zhi'.

I doubt though if that Chinese person would start giving you an answer half as fanciful as an English person might be tempted to if you asked that English person exactly what the 'cric' or 'ket' of 'cricket' meant (the insect rather than the sport), to borrow an example from the ABC ECCE's discussion (cf. xīshuài 蟋蟀) of 'Free and Bound Characters' (page 518). And it's a good thing that they divided that English word up in a way that makes it as meaningless as possible, because a division instead into 'crick' and 'et' would've provided even greater (indeed, horrifying, Lovecraftianly sanity-blasting!) incentive for the wannabe English folk etymologist (vs. entomologist LOL) to start flexing their verbal rather than mental mussels, oops, muscles!

Hope that at least halfway answers your question, albeit in a roundabout way!

*FWIW, the ABC ECCE counts 殖 as a bound form: 7zhí 殖 B.F. 1) propogate 1fánzhí 2) colonize zhímíndì. Then there is the entry for fán (繁): 3fán 繁 B.F. 1) complicated fántǐzì 2) numerous; manifold 3) propogate; multiply 1fánzhí. By the way, the 生殖 shēngzhí that Y&R mention isn't however given as one of the BFs at 7zhí, due no doubt to the fact that the shēng that heads that particular compound, and has the meaning of 'to give birth', is a free form...so shēngzhí can simply follow on quite naturally from shēng and without that head character being in any sense bound to just that compound (i.e. the BF zhí doesn't bind the free shēng). "BONUS": the ABC entries for 1shēngzhí, 1fánzhí, and zhímíndì are at least all marked/bulleted in the ECCE as HSK grades D, C, and D respectively.

[Ludens]

Thanks, it indeed halfway answers my question ;)!

The ABC EC-CE dictionary has arrived, and I'm really happy with it. At the moment, one of the most useful features of it for me is the indication of bound form characters. I'm now going through all my individual character SRS cards, to tag them as BF when appropriate. I also find the definitions in this dictionary are often more meaningful and descriptive than those I've found online.

The ABC is my first Chinese dictionary, so I can't really write a meaningful review. But the few (and only) things I don't like about it until now all have to do with the omission of characters. Most importantly, I would have liked the examples of compounds in the definitions of bound form characters to have characters besides the pinyin. The same goes for the Chinese graded word lists. I also would have liked even more example sentences, also for the less common words, but I'm aware that that's not really possible for a dictionary this size.

Anyway, I'm really glad with the overall quality and usefulness of the ABC dictionary.

[anonymoose]

I doubt though if that Chinese person would start giving you an answer half as fanciful as an English person might be tempted to if you asked that English person exactly what the 'cric' or 'ket' of 'cricket' meant (the insect rather than the sport), to borrow an example from the ABC ECCE's discussion (cf. xīshuài 蟋蟀) of 'Free and Bound Characters' (page 518)

I don't think this is a very good example, and I've never really agreed that characters cannot be attributed with a meaning in isolation. The fact that Chinese is composed of discrete characters enables a word, such as 蟋蟀, to naturally be broken into components. In fact, if you showed an English speaker the letters cric or ket in isolation, they probably wouldn't have a clue about the meaning, but any literate Chinese person would immediately think of 蟋蟀 if they were shown either 蟋 or 蟀 in isolation. And the fact that characters have this association, even in isolation, allows new words to be built upon them individually, for example 迷卡斗蟋, where 蟋 is not used together with 蟀. So clearly, 蟋 does have an independent meaning, even if it is never used on its own. This is evidently different from English, in which it would be meaningless to say mikadocric.

[OneEye]

(which I've had to supply componentially, due to them being unavailable in e.g. MDBG!): "a white horse with dark lips" (马+全), "a horse with dark lips" (马+粦), and "a yellow horse with dark lips" (马+呙)

Sure those are available. One is even a simplified character, so it can't be all that rare. 駩 驎 䯄(騧)

[Gharial]

Hi again Ludens, glad to hear your dictionary arrived OK and that you're finding it useful! I agree that it would've been nice if characters could've been supplied alongside the Pinyin for the BF compounds, but I guess that would've meant a lot of wrapping around onto new lines and thus increased the size of the dictionary considerably. There's not as much excuse however for them not supplying the characters in the Chinese graded word lists, but if it's any consolation, Mikelove from Pleco very kindly provides them in electronic format and complete with the characters in post #7 (here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/30185-abc-e-cc-e-whats-the-story/page__view__findpost__p__236139 ) of my ECCE review thread.

Hi Anonymoose, I was joking a bit with my portrayal of the English folk etymologist (you can't have met many dodgy teachers of English though! Or seen how studying morphology, roots n stems etc can get students looking for meanings that aren't there), and certainly wasn't disagreeing that individual Chinese characters can be assigned a provisional meaning (that is after all the whole point of this thread!) based on their attested contexts and compounds. I'm not sure that you have much of a point though when you implicitly criticize the the ABC ECCE for not indicating that 蟋 isn't always bound to 蟀, considering that a) it's only a general dictionary and wouldn't claim to be encyclopedic (whatever that would mean - "full of useless trivia"?), and b] 蟋 is still bound (as you yourself admit) in the sense that it has to be preceded by that 迷卡斗 (or whatever else might modify it); that is, we both recognize that the most important point is that neither of these characters is ever used on its own, in itself. I guess if the ECCE were to ever be expanded into an entomologist's (rather than learner of Chinese's) bible, it would mark the 蟋 as bound in not only 蟋蟀 but also at least 迷卡斗蟋. (There, satisfied? ). As for the part Pinyin transliteration + part "English" mikadocric, personally I quite like the sound of that and believe it would catch on in English, if it were introduced in enough of a "high-profile" way!

Hi OneEye, can I ask where you got the characters from? (I'm hoping the answer isn't "From a little-known-or-used source detailing characters recovered from a Trigan starship unearthed in Kumquat province and full of pre-Warring Inkbrush period characters carved on aardvark patella by means of pterodactyl-beak-sharpened jade nostril hooks" :o ). And even if (the character for) 'yellow horse with dark lips' apparently "isn't rare", I don't think I'll be buying one for my daughter - she wants a 'purple horse with yellow polka dots and lips like Mick Jagger' instead (not sure there's a character for that one though! ).

[OneEye]

Hi OneEye, can I ask where you got the characters from? (I'm hoping the answer isn't "From a little-known-or-used source detailing characters recovered from a Trigan starship unearthed in Kumquat province and full of pre-Warring Inkbrush period characters carved on aardvark patella by means of pterodactyl-beak-sharpened jade nostril hooks" :o ). And even if the character for 'yellow horse with dark lips' apparently "isn't rare", I don't think I'll be buying one for my daughter - she wants a 'purple horse with yellow polka dots and lips like Mick Jagger' instead (not sure there's a character for that one though! ).

If you have OSX, you can find it in the "character palette". Search by radical and then search order. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the best way would be.

[Gharial]

Thanks, OneEye - I was forgetting stuff like that (there's always something to forget with Chinese - that, or it'll always be quite hard work remembering and doing the things we shouldn't be forgetting!). Word has similar function with 'Insert Symbol' - just checked and found at least the first two characters in it via MingLiu font. I guess it's certainly a bit more accessible than the Trigan starship stuff I was anticipating!

Not sure if anybody's interested, but just thought I'd mention a book that represents the English Corpus Linguistics viewpoint quite well: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N8_IOrJUUPEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (and the two most interesting chapters are also available in the form of http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Eox9QgAACAAJ&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1 , though no preview of this latter work is available on Google Books). See esp. page 145, para 2 onwards for its discussion/slight knicker-twisting regarding 'friendly fire', and compare that with the pretty straightforward and componentially clear 误伤/杀 wùshāng/shā translation given in the E-C section of the ABC ECCE. But of course there are also items or idioms in Chinese that taken literally will not always be entirely clear, but should cease to be a problem when translated into English.

[anonymoose]

satisfied?

Not really. You missed my main point, which is that individual characters, even those never used in isolation, are associated with an identifiable meaning, unlike syllables such as cric or ket in English.

[Gharial]

You missed my main point, which is that individual characters, even those never used in isolation, are associated with an identifiable meaning, unlike syllables such as cric or ket in English.

Well, at least we can be satisfied that syllables such as nit and pick are associated with identifiable (indeed, isolatable) meanings in English.

But seriously, I'd question what you mean by 'associated with identifiable meanings'. If the respondent/informant enumerates (or the corpus simply produces) compounds or more or less fixed collocations (which is what I'm assuming you ultimately mean by 'associated with identifiable meanings') in order to fully and unambiguously contextualize the meaning of any "individual" character, what is the actual difference between all that and the concept of bound forms?* (And again, I'm certainly not arguing that bound forms will prevent provisional meanings "plural" being assigned to each of the component characters - that's the individual learner's prerogative, regardless of what academics might say (not that I'm claiming to be an academic)). You seem to be doing little more than trying to split hairs.

As for the cric and ket, nobody was actually disagreeing with you, so I think that one can be chalked up to you simply misreading what I'd said (though I thought my point by way of the exaggerated joking was clear enough).

It would've perhaps been best if the ABC ECCE had respected English's orthographic and semantic notion of indivisible word (e.g. there is 'cricket' and 'bat' and 'cricket bat'...), but doing so would obviously have not allowed the ECCE to draw its somewhat flawed analogy between such differing languages and their writing systems...not that the shortcomings of that analogy really affect the practical validity of the ECCE's bound form information for Chinese (whose characters are well-formed morphemes regardless, versus compositionally-meaningless phonemes or strings of phonemes, which is what the non-words "cric" and especially "ket" ultimately are in English).

*That was a rhetorical question by the way (in case the thread abruptly ends here) - I doubt you have an answer. Next time you want to give a person a "hard time", perhaps try picking somebody who isn't prepared to answer back with stuff that actually makes a modicum of sense, eh. Or better yet, perhaps consider writing to the ABC guys, as they're the ones who came up with that example and general system (which IMHO is more helpful than not) in the first place. Sorry if I'm starting to sound a bit bad-tempered here, but I find that being unnecessarily "corrected" on what are ultimately matters of "differing" methodological opinion gets a little tiresome.

[renzhe]

There will be many opinions on this.

Ultimately, you should know the meanings of individual characters, as higher-level writing often abbreviates words into single characters, and knowing the meanings of the characters will really help you figure out the rough meaning of words you don't know when you are reading (and there are many words in Chinese, you'll keep running into new ones for quite a while). Also, there are many common characters (surnames, things used for transliterations) which never form common words, but you still see them all over the place.

Like anonymoose says, a Chinese syllable (almost always) carries a meaning, and this is useful. If you know the meaning of "fire" and "man", it's easy to guess what a "fireman" is. At the same time, knowing words will help you remember the meaning of the individual characters too. When learning Chinese, things complement each other, and you can rarely learn them one after the other. You have to pursue many things in parallel for a long time.

As a beginner, you need vocabulary items -- words which form speech. Some of them are single-characters, some of them longer, most are composed of two characters. The best thing to do here, I think, is to follow a good vocabulary list, either from a textbook, or by learning from HSK lists.

Whether memorising characters on their own at this stage is the right thing to do, I don't know. Personally, I crammed the most common 3000 the painful way (along with learning words) and concentrated on lots of reading, and it seemed to work.

[anonymoose]

*That was a rhetorical question by the way (in case the thread abruptly ends here) - I doubt you have an answer.

Every time I open this thread, you seem to have edited your post. I didn't bother responding initially because you hadn't provided anything of substance to respond to. However, since you're worried about this thread ending abruptly, I'll answer your rhetorical question:

what is the actual difference between all that and the concept of bound forms?

In my personal opinion, the concept of bound forms is somewhat arbitrary. Yes, of course there are characters that always appear bound with others, just as there are words in English which cannot stand alone. But unlike English, a Chinese sentence breaks up naturally into individual units - characters, which I would argue, all have an associated meaning, even if they are never used in isolation.

Going back to the 蟋蟀 example, I have already provided an example of where 蟋 is used independently of 蟀, and here is an example of 蟀 being used independently of 蟋. Clearly in both cases 蟋 and 蟀 carry an independent meaning.

Sorry if I'm starting to sound a bit bad-tempered here, but I find that being unnecessarily "corrected" on what are ultimately matters of "differing" methodological opinion gets a little tiresome.

I wasn't correcting anything you said. I was posting my personal opinion on the quote that you provided from ABC ECCE. It's funny how you acknowledge there being differing methodological opinion, yet you get your knickers in a twist when someone actually voices their different opinion. I'm not forcing you to agree with it, but if you want to continue this argument, then at least point out where you disagree with me or provide a counter example rather than coming back with nothing but unsubstantiated whining.

[Gharial]

You seem to be under the impression that you've added so much to this thread, Anonymoose, but a few facts aka a reality check might be in order:

1) I think I can say that certainly me and Ludens were (believe it or not!) having quite a nice chat before you showed up.
2) The ABC ECCE is still an excellent resource despite your implicit criticism of it.
3) Whatever the Chinese may be for 'cricket' beyond the ECCE bound "citation" form (and perhaps even that too) is likely to be and remain of very marginal interest and relevance to the majority of learners; that is, cricket//xi(/)shuai has a pretty low "surrender value", and just because the ABC uses it as one of its examples of bound forms doesn't mean we need to flog it to death and beyond. (Frankly, I feel that these forums are full enough of trivia already).
4) Learners will however usually be able to generally understand what any unbound ("separated, individual") forms mean from having learnt them as paired bound forms (this is obviously a 'whole to parts' approach), so there's really no need to inflict too much extraneous stuff. Bound form information is therefore maximally informative and co-textually very explicit, leaving the learner in little doubt as to the meaning and more besides.
5) People are not duty-bound to explicitly comment on every point you make (not that your 'main point' by way then of your 'Not really. You missed my main point, which is that...' didn't get addressed eventually by my rhetorical question, although by then your rather humourless and pushy rhetoric had done its "damage"), regardless of how much you might want to insist otherwise - or is there really no option but to agree, despite any facts to the contrary, with whatever you say?
6) It's funny how you acknowledge there being differing methodological opinion, yet you get your knickers in a twist when someone actually voices their different opinion. You failed to notice the scare quotes thus around my use of the word "differing" in the quote you made. I really don't think we ultimately differ that much in our opinions, though your objection to the term 'bound form' in the context of an obviously finite-capacity printed learner's dictionary, and your subsequent pursuit of marginal trivia, is certainly making it appear as if we do. I have made very clear several times in this thread how I believe that the learner is free to assign whatever meanings they like to individual characters, so I'm not really objecting to your claim that individual characters can have an "associated meaning" in principle. <*IDEA*> I guess if the ABC ECCE had used something like 'associated forms' instead of 'bound forms' you'd have had much less of a problem with it?
7) The clincher however is probably this:

 

But unlike English, a Chinese sentence breaks up naturally into individual units - characters, which I would argue, all have an associated meaning, even if they are never used in isolation.

That ignores how the the Chinese "character-based" sentence will be broken up in terms of its transcription into Pinyin. I suppose the next thing you'll be telling me is that English writing is actually composed of alphabetical letters, and that the conventions marshalling those letters into the silly things called words have been of so little benefit.

[required10]

Do Chinese people know that 殖 means "to breed", although the character never occurs in isolation? If so, do they know / learn the definition of all individual characters they know as components of polysyllabic words?

The answer to this question is usually "yes". When native speakers confront with an unknown compound word (well it happens, sometimes) they tend to first give a , though very very vague, guess based on the parts.

For example, "回收站" can mean "reclamation depot" in everyday life. This word has two parts in a native's eye: "回收" & "站", but it is just OK to guess it from the three characters if you don't even know "回收" as a word. "回" is "back", "收" is receive, "站" can be "stand" or "station". A guess might be "somewhere that gets something back or receives something", you see it's very vague but it's just what reclamation depots basically do.

But the answer is sometimes "no", when some certain characters always appear in a certain word together and have no other usage, such as "旮旯", you don't have to know the meaningless meaning of "旮" or "旯", only the meaning of the word matters, which is like "corner".

That said, it's not useful for beginners. Since you have to know the meaning of the characters first , and to grasp the meaning of the character correctly you might again need the help of other words. For beginners , better remember the words as a whole, and after encountering several new words with some same character in them, it's good time to remember the meaning of the character then.