MandoPug

Some bite-sized Mandarin knowledge for your casual online scrolling from a student POV. Credits to Canva for the profile pic

[mandopug]

Compound ideograms are characters that are made up of two different characters. Often, you can sort of make sense of the compound ideogram why looking at the smaller characters. But, in our modern sense of logic, it's sometimes a bit confusing trying to understand why people thought of these combinations, so it's important to keep an open mind.

For example, the character 看 (look) is made up of the character 手 (hand) and 目 (eye). That's because you need to put shield you eyes with your hand to block out the sun in order to look properly!

[mandopug]

Simple ideograms are characters that act as icons to represent abstract ideas. Actually, they operate on the same concept as, say, the heart emoji (❤️), which is an icon for love, an abstract concept.

[mandopug]

Part two on your Understanding Chinese Characters series is photosemantic characters. These types of characters contain both the general meaning and the vague sound in one character. Usually, the radical located on the left will tell you the what this character relates to, such as water, fire, or illnesses. The character on the right usually rhymes with the character, and so will give you the vowel sound of that character.

[mandopug]

I'm beginning a series of posts about the types of Chinese characters. The first on the list: pictograms. These are the basic, basic building blocks of the Chinese character universe.

Pictograms originated when people from centuries ago decided to mimic the shapes of objects around them and carved them into bones and turtle shells (oracle bone script). Here are some articles where you can learn more about pictograms: https://chinese4kids.net/exploring-chinese-pictographic-characters/ https://www.writtenchinese.com/learn-to-read-with-these-20-chinese-pictographs/ Image Credits: Canva, Wikipeda

[mandopug]

How a Character Makes Another

One character often becomes a part of several others, all of which share similar meanings.

When I learn a character like that, I will learn the characters that the original character lead to. Since they have similar meanings, my brain can remember more characters with less effort!

[mandopug]

Several characters in Mandarin look similar, but have different meanings.

Look, I wished I have a method to tell them apart, but really, the only method I have so far is to understand the meaning of the character on the right. That requries time and effort. But for characters derrived from images, I'm sorry to say the only method is practice :(

[mandopug]

Despite all the headache, Mandarin is a great language to learn!

For me, the main motivation I have in learning Mandarin is... the food! You have no idea what a euphoria I get in ordering a mountainload of food in China. Who cares about stomach rupture, am I right?

Jokes aside, Mandarin's an important language. Not only will you get to talk with amazing people, you will also experience a diverse, vibrant culture that's been on this Earth for thousands of years. Photo credits: Canva IMDB East Asia Forum school of international language

[mandopug]

Account introduction

Hi! This is an account set to be a source of information about Mandarin that you can scroll through in your freetime.Learning Mandarin from an English-speaking POV despite having a Chinese passport, I would like to offer some tips and pointers to make Mandarin easier to learn for English-speakers.