One of these spans has been going on now since about the end of September. For just over 2 months I've been cooking, cleaning, exercising, learning Chinese, reading, and even starting drawing and doing a little bit of painting. What can I say? I'm in the zone.
My rekindling of interest in learning Chinese has turned on a somewhat obvious light bulb in my head.
Chinese is easy!!
Although I had been staring at it for a year and 8 months, it has only recently been brought to my attention that Chinese is it's own derivative language (as opposed to the romantic languages deriving from Latin).
What does that mean for the student? It means that if the student knows a handful of nouns, the student can use those nouns to decipher other compound nouns.
For example, someone who speaks, let's say Russian, and is learning both English and Chinese. A few weeks into the courses, they come across these two words to match with one of these 2 pictures:
- pistachio
- 開心果
Given the beginner level in both languages of the native Russian speaker, it is in my opinion as an ESL teacher, he or she would not only butcher the pronunciation of the word "pistachio," but also be left without even the slightest idea of the meaning.
I have not even attempted to learn Chinese characters, but I do know that after a few weeks of learning, or even being exposed to the written language, a student would probably recognize that 開 means "open," 心 means "heart," and 果 means either "fruit" or "nut."
Furthermore, it might already be known that combining the first two characters, 開心 is also a way to say "happy."
So whether our hypothetical Russian student wants to interpret that as "open-heart nut" or a "happy nut," my guess is that he or she would know right away that it's not a lawn mower.
My long-winded point is, it's a huge confidence boost when I hear or see a word I don't know, but am able to figure it out using what I know already. Chinese is easy!!!
Let's play a game! Here are some directly translated Chinese-English words.... any guesses?
"oak mouse"
"long neck deer"
"cat head eagle"
"river horse"
"wall tiger"
"hand machine"
"cowboy pants"
"fairy palm"
"green flower vegetable"
"outside covering"
"Beautiful Land/Country"
(answers in the next post!)
5 comments:
I am waiting for the answers.....
You've often gone through these phases - taught your self to juggle one summer, the bass guitar another summer, then the acoustic guitar.
I got brown mouse, giraffe, screwdriver, jeans, broccoli, awning and USA
I'm somewhat at your stage now, too. I'm learning characters by writing them. And the more I practice, the easier it all seems. The beauty of traditional Chinese characters is that the complexity of more strokes makes it easy to remember them, because they usually consist of radicals and small versions of characters, it's like Lego for me. And once you have a solid base of characters in your head, it's so easy to learn new ones. I know how to write "I" 我 and "bird" 鳥, hence, I know how to write "goose" 鵝.
Btw, I have another one for your list: Fire bird = turkey 火雞
As for "Beautiful country" or America 美國, it's a short form of a transliteration, which was 美利堅 or Meilijian and came from the word (A)merica. Many words for countries today are formed like this, England, France, Germany etc. Just for your reference.
I learned that 美國 was a transliteration not too long ago actually. As an American, I like the direct translation better (haha).
In this post I had only been learning speaking/listening Chinese, but I've also just started learning by writing characters. As with most books that teach it, they are side by side with Simplified characters, which like you pointed out, have no real reference points. With the traditional characters, I remember them by putting together a short sentence for each, which is lost in the simplified.
加油！
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