Warning: learning words (instead of characters) considered harmful

[jbradfor]

[Now that I have your attention.....]

I'm not actually proposing that it is better to learn characters instead of words; I still think that beyond a couple hundred characters, in general learning words is better. However, I have noticed a couple of characters whose meaning, or common/alternative meaning, I'm unable to remember because the word in which I first learned that character threw me off.

For example, I have a very hard time remembering that 非 means "not". Probably like most of you, I first learned 非 in "非常". So I associated "非" with "very" or "extreme". Of course it doesn't mean that, it means "not", and "非常" together is a very straight-forward "not common". However, I didn't realize that for so many years after I learned "非常" that it took me years to unlearn.

Or take 公. I first learned it in many context to mean "public". I am unable to remember that it also means "male". Someone was telling me about the names of some NBA teams names' in Chinese, and I had no idea who the "public cows" were. [公牛]

耐心 is another example for me. It means "patient". So I thought 耐 means patient. While "durable heart" is in many ways very good definition of "patient", I didn't realize that for a long time, and the second word I tried to learn with 耐, I just couldn't make sense of "patient warmth" (耐溫).

虛 is my current one, from 虛心. This case is a bit different, as 虛 does mean "modest"; however, the majority of words that contain 虛 have nothing to do with modesty.

Anyone else ran into a similar situation?

[jkhsu]

I've run into the same problem all the time. What I end up doing is with every new word I learn I always look up the individual characters to see if there are other meanings I am missing and I also try to "briefly" look through other words formed by the individual characters. The KTdict CE App on the iPad works pretty well for this. However, that doesn't mean I remember them though.

Or take 公. I first learned it in many context to mean "public".

There is a sign at the main entrance of Chinatown in San Francisco that reads "天下为公" (This of course is written right to left in real life). I thought the "公" was public also until it was pointed out to me that it was yet another meaning of "公" which is peace.

Edit: I've been since corrected by fanglu that the "公" in "天下为公" does mean public. Read the thread for details.

[Glenn]

Anyone else ran into a similar situation?

Yes. In my case, many times I'll learn a character and its meaning, then only see it in one word frequently, then associate the meaning of the word with the meaning of the character, then get thrown off when I see it in some other context. Like jkhsu, I usually end up going back to checking the meaning(s) of the character again when something just doesn't make sense. I spend lots of time with dictionaries.

[fanglu]

"天下为公" I thought the "公" was public also until it was pointed out to me that it was yet another meaning of "公" which is peace.

It does mean public. It's strongly associated with Sun Yat-sen, who's ideology emphasises that the country, its government and its wealth belong to all of the people.

[jkhsu]

It does mean public.

Thank you fanglu and more power to these forums. I was actually told by a native speaker from China that the "公" in the "天下为公" meant "fair" (sorry, I meant to say fair instead of peace), but it's still wrong. Native speakers can be wrong too. Although I sort of made a fool of myself, I'm glad I did because at least I learned it right.

[Gharial]

It sounds like you've perhaps given things not enough thought in the past, and are now giving them what could be a bit too much!

Regarding the 非常 example, any good dictionary (that gives parts of speech, accurate "independent" as well as compound meaning-translations etc) should enable the user to arrive at "uncommonly" as a literal gloss, and 'extremely' or 'very very' or whatever as more colloquial-sounding translations. Same thing really with 公 (surely that's a prime case if any for surveying all the meanings the character might have independently as well as in compound phrases, when first encountering and learning it "versus" them!).

Then, I've always found the Kenkyusha/NTC New Japanese-English Character Dictionary very useful, because it assigns usually a single keyword, a 'core meaning', to each character, and includes an appendix of kanji synonyms (i.e. a virtual kanji thesaurus!) that allows the user to compare and contrast the meanings; so in a section (entitled 'emptiness and nothing') of the appendix one finds the following:

空 EMPTY

白 WHITE (blank)

虛 VOID

無 NOTHING

零 ZERO

(Personally though I'd be tempted to provisionally call 虛 simply "empty" too - no absolute reason that there couldn't be a few identically-labelled synonyms, is there).

This thread is sort of reminding me of an earlier discussion:

http://www.chinese-f...dual-characters

[LaoJian]

I think a better way to understand relationship between whole different meanings about same character is to know more culture and history behind this character, then remember these meanings with typical word or short sentence. - same way like I learn English word.

I'm not a professional educator or linguist, just one educated Chinese native speaker:). But I would like to introduce some of my understanding for the word you mentioned.

公 - public and male, these two meaning have potential relations. may you know, China keep a very long history of patrilineal society(父系社会), '公' at the beginning, is used as a respect title for men and male people in society， the format is 'positive nick name'+'公', it is very common in old China, if you hope to express your respect to sb., just call him with its nickname+'公';(if you read chinese classical novel<三国演义>, you should know '关羽', his nick name is '美髯公');

may you also know, old China have very serious value judgement in gender, look up to men and down to women, female people have no social position and status in China, so old society always ignore existence of women, when talk about political and social events, people think the society are composed of male people - specially adult men. so '公' gradually expend to express whole society, 'public'

[LaoJian]

again, I strongly recommend you guys can learn word from reading with context to understand one word or character meaning, I think although Chinese Character is pictorial language, but the meaning of Chinese are much more abstract, if you compare culture between west and east, I may notice Chinese culture are more likely to be abstract, we like to express create one thing which can apply for multiple specific things, such as Chinese Painting(abstract and brief). so if you want to learn one word or character, you have to involve into context, history culture and scene, I know there is much painful because China has thousands of cultures, one word may be defined many meanings during long period...

[jbradfor]

It sounds like you've perhaps given things not enough thought in the past, and are now giving them what could be a bit too much!

Humm.... I think there is actually a lot of truth to that statement!

When I first learned all those words, it was either during an intensive summer program, or studying in Taiwan. Both times I was pretty overwhelmed just trying to keep up. Plus, this was pre-MDBG, making searching for all words with a given character more difficult. [The dictionary I had would list words started with a given character, but that took work as well.]

Now, it's just a hobby, and MDBG makes jumping from word to word so easy. I'm not sure I would call it too much, but....

[creamyhorror]

It sounds like you've perhaps given things not enough thought in the past, and are now giving them what could be a bit too much!

Chinese really opened up for me once I started breaking down words into their component characters and understanding why expressions and chengyus meant what they meant. In my opinion, this is a necessary transition on the path toward advanced learnerhood. It's what Chinese speakers who really know their language all do. I don't know if you can really give this sort of analysis "too much thought", since it's helpful most of the time - the meanings of most compound words can actually be (retrospectively) derived from their components.

All this became possible for me mostly because I got access to convenient electronic and mobile dictionaries; I would never have bothered with checking meanings of characters in my paper dictionary as a kid.

Beyond knowing why the words mean what they mean, I also find it important to input example sentences and collocations into my flashcards, so that they become linked to the web of words in my mind, and aren't merely represented by glosses. This also helps me clarify the parts of speech that words can be used as (transitive vs intransitive verb, adjective, noun). An example:

穿梭

-------------

chuān suō

to travel back and forth, shuttle

to traverse, pass through [space-time, the ocean, etc.]

燕姿就像­正常人在新加坡穿梭

穿梭粵港滬的黃龍; 穿梭时空; 海底穿梭

Once I've done that for a word, I feel I understand it much better. I don't need to read the examples every time the card comes up in Anki either; they're only to reinforce my learning when I feel I need it.

edit: Also, related to Gharial's post, I find knowing a bunch of synonymous characters is helpful, because I can sort of group them together and remember their basic meanings easily that way (e.g. 应，该，当).

[drungood]

I think you are overestimating the importance of knowing every context a character could be used in. The main reason to associate an English word to a Chinese character is to create a memory peg to help you recall it later. For example, I will not forget the example team name you just gave because the thought "public cows" let me form a memorable mental image. Although it may be nice to learn why the characters were used in that context at some point in the future, that's just a fine point and not nearly as important as reproducing the team name in written form on demand. And I think studying individual characters is the most efficient way to achieve this, since a good book like Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi can get you through about a thousand a month without too much difficulty.

[renzhe]

I have found that it kind of all works out in the end.

The key is to understand that the meaning goes in both directions: characters give meaning to words, but words also often get shortened into characters.

That's why I don't think that there is a "correct" and "right" sequence to learning all this. Either you memorise a dozen meanings that a character can have (hard) and then have an easier time learning new words (most of them make sense), or you learn a lot of words through brute memorisation without understanding the characters (hard) and then over time infer the different meanings of the character from a broad range of words you know (easy).

As with most aspects of learning Chinese, I have found that a pragmatic approach works best (coupled with patience). As you encounter new words, try to understand the meaning from the character. If it doesn't make sense, look up the meaning of the characters which you were missing.

[Gharial]

Saying "too much thought" may sound a bit harsh, but it's nontheless true if one is having to figure too many things out due to a possible lack of good resources (and MDBG, for all its ease and features, ultimately just repeats what can be found in many conventional dictionaries. The main thing I use it for is to survey the range a character has in non-initial position, via MDBG's *X* and *X search options).

Call me crazy, but one very good way to learn everything about a character is to compile your own dictionary, replete with well-chosen glosses (based on surveying the translations usually given to individual characters versus their use in compounds, and across a range of contexts* etc), pedagogical-yet-colloquial examples, mnemonics (for not only meaning but also pronunciation, esp. tone) etc, which is what I'm currently doing, with an organizational/indexical emphasis on the phonetic components-as-wholes (i.e. non-radical residues) of characters. (The initial character list was basically the head entries in the Oxford Concise/Pocket/Desk dictionary, but obviously this needs to be widened somewhat when building up from a parsed "etymological"-phonetic analysis of the characters). Although it can take hours, days even in the case of particularly complex characters, to compile a single rough entry containing all this information, the process really aids one's revision and/or learning, and the bonus is that you end up with a resource that you can refer back to and really depend on (if only because it makes sense to you, and you know you can "trust" the information that it contains, seeing as you wrote it!). [i did a similar thing with that 'Guide to Simplified Radicals' I wrote (which leads into my phonetic dictionary, in that the guide and other materials explain how conventional dictionaries work, facts which are then built on in learning how my "unconventional" dictionary works almost in contrast!), and it's now the main resource I depend on and have by my side whenever I'm using radical indexes to look things up in dictionaries (though I don't need my guide so much with the excellent ABC ECCE - can't plug that dictionary enough!)].

*I find E-E-C thesaurus-like works such as the bilingualized Longman Lexicon very handy in this regard (I view quality learner dictionaries as balanced corpora in themselves). Which reminds me, I must one day get the bilingualized Oxford Wordfinder, as well as the Oxford Collocations Dictionary!

[imron]

Call me crazy, but one very good way to learn everything about a character is to compile your own dictionary,

Heh, and there was me thinking using a paper dictionary was hardcore

[Gharial]

Hardcore is lashing together a stack of dictionaries with barbed wire, and lifting 'em up and down with just your teeth. It's how top Sinologists keep in shape, apparently.

[renshanrenhai]

This post gives me a second thought on how Chinglish (spoken or written English that is influenced by Chinese) comes in to being among Chinese people.

I guess you probably have come across the 成语 "人山人海"somewhere in Chinese written language."people mountain people sea." is a very typical example of a Chinglish translation.

At a threshold level in English, Chinese people are very likely to think every single Chinese character has an equivalent word in English and, therefore they guess coupling two English word together will make sense as that does in Chinese language. So they come up with a Chinglish like "people mountain people sea" for "人山人海".

If we are going to find some similarity of morphology shared between English and Chinese, we can realize that phrasal verb is mostly like the "word" in Chinese.

耐心 is another example for me. It means "patient". So I thought 耐 means patient.

The character "耐" carries much more meanings than the word"耐心" as you have realized. "耐心的"means "patient", not “耐" means patient. It's like "put up with" means "bear",not "put" means "bear".

Most of the Chinese characters are very like "verb"s in phrasal verbs in English;coupled with another one, it becomes another word.

threw me off

You use this phrasal verb in your post and it's a new word for me. With the help of context here, I guess it means "make you confused". But, I am afraid i will never work out the meaning of "throw off" when they are isolated from the text.

My question is How do you learn phrasal verb in English? (I firmly believe there must be something similar between learning phrasal verb and learning Chinese words.)

[Gharial]

Hi Sally! If I were writing a dictionary entry for 'throw off', I'd start with a basic diagram something like a sign for 'fork in road' (e.g. http://theaccidental...inks-view-field ) to convey the essential meaning of "a parting of one thing from another", which would then be used to symbolize the physical action of throwing off clothing (in a small picture of somebody doing just that, with a transparent fork lightly superimposed over the picture, the left arrow pointing in the direction the person's body is generally now moving, and the right in the direction the clothes are being thrown by the person's trailing arm), or being thrown off (of) land etc, through to showing how "agents" such as storms throw somebody or something off (of/from e.g. the correct course/route/way: again, one can imagine the fork parting as it exits a storm cloud, with the left arrow pointing to the correct course, and the right arrow, which the plane is now following, indicating the incorrect course).

I've just had a quick look through all the major EFL learner dictionaries freely available online (the Longman DoCE, Oxford ALD, Cambridge ALD, Macmillan ED, and Merriam-Webster Learner's), and the M-W seems about the most comprehensive for 'throw off' at least: http://www.learnersd...om/search/throw

Dedicated phrasal verb dictionaries can also be useful, and two of the best are the Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary for Learners of English, and the Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus.

The character "耐" carries much more meanings than the word"耐心" as you have realized. "耐心的"means "patient", not “耐" means patient. It's like "put up with" means "bear",not "put" means "bear".

Good examples.

[马盖云]

Quote

threw me off

You use this phrasal verb in your post and it's a new word for me. With the help of context here, I guess it means "make you confused". But, I am afraid i will never work out the meaning of "throw off" when they are isolated from the text.

As are many phrases in English (as well as chengyu in Chinese), this is kind of a shortened version of the more complete thought: "threw me off the trail" or "path". The idea is that you are going along with some understanding, and something comes up that confuses, or messes you up. A more literal reading of the full phrase might describe how, for example, an escaped prisoner might try to remove their clothes, or walk through a river to try to "throw off" the search dogs who are trying to catch them. Or to in some other way try to make their trail hard to follow.

It is pretty clear, then, how this can be used in the more abstract way to describe being made confused by new information contrary to your expectations. :-)