Hey fuckface 😘😅 while I'm here, any tips on starting to learn to read and write mandarin?
ahaaaa well I will try. You probably already know there is barely any coherence between a character’s visual aspects and the word’s pronunciation.
I’d say a real starter tip is to look at the characters’ radicals. Maybe you’re familiar with radicals. They are, indeed, totally radical. When seen as components, radicals (which are usually used to look up characters in a dictionary) make up chinese characters, whether they contain one (人), two (从), three (众) or many more radicals (灣), which, btw, can be positioned above each other [早 (日 and 十)], at each other’s left and right [媽 (女 and 馬)] or even be inside another radical [囚 (囗 and 人)]. A helpful step to learning new chinese characters is looking at the common radicals used in chinese characters. For one, they make identifying the structure of a character and thus writing it much easier! Also, if you know the basic meaning of radicals, you can often predict the meaning of the character you’re looking at.
But be careful!
Radicals / components can be used either to carry meaning, or as a phonetic device. As mentioned above, you can’t necessarily tell the pronunciation of a word just by looking at it’s character. However, Mandarin Chinese also heavily depends on homonyms; words that sound the same or somewhat similar can mean a totally different thing if the character is written differently. One of my favourite examples is:
草.
Now, let’s try to understand this character. First of all: It consists of three radicals, all of which are very simple ones. They are stacked on top of each other and you’ve even seen the second and third one in this post. Together, these form 早, a very common character, which means “morning”. In modern Mandarin Chinese, 早 is pronounced zǎo (if you haven’t looked at pinyin, the common transcription system for Mandarin Chinese pronunciation in mainland China, this should help). Now, there is no relation whatsoever between zǎo and the pronounciation of the radicals which make up its character (fyi: 日 rì, means sun; 十 shí, means ten). However, 草 is closely related to 早! We see those three (depending on font, script or manner of writing) or four lines at the very top of the character, crossing each other. I’ve not yet covered their meaning in this post because YES INDEED, they are a new radical.
Quick background info: 艹 is derived from 艸, an old character depicting grass. As it’s an old character, we can’t be bothered with it’s pronunciation. So, 艹 probably hints towards the semantic level of the character (the meaning-side) and we can see that 草 will be related to plant things (another character with this radical is 茶, meaning “tea”). So, we can assume that, while the upper radical of 草 carries the meaning, the rest should still serve a purpose. And this purpose is, what i called a phonetic device before. It tells us that 草 has a similar pronunciation to 早. And, as expected, it is pronounced cǎo.
草 / cǎo is the modern character for “grass”!
There are many more, easy-to remember examples, such as
媽 (see above)
which contains 馬 mǎ, horse, on the right, which tells us about the pronunciation, too! (Well, the compound character is pronounced mā) But the meaning “mum” is indicated by the left radical, 女 nǚ, woman.
Concerning the writing of Chinese Characters, there are two predominantly different options to choose from: Traditional and simplified characters. Simplified characters have been introduced by the PROC’s government in the 20th century, officially to improve literacy and alphabetization among the Chinese people, and it’s used in most Chinese texts which do not come friom Taiwan, Singapore, Macau or Hongkong. These use traditional characters, which often give more insight into their own meaning. Most famous example, I’d say, is 愛, the character for love. In its centre, it contains 心, a heart. The simplified form of the love character is 爱, literally heartless.
Furthermore, simplified characters can often look completely different from their traditional counterparts. One counting word (i.e. for persons) is 個 ge. Its simplified version, 个, looks barely like it!So choose wisely, which one you want to learn or if you even want to choose only one. Plenty of characters that I know, I know in their traditional and simplified forms, caused by the multiple ways in which I learn Mandarin.
Finally, I should give you two important keywords to look up and always remember, because they are key to a good and readable handwriting in Chinese:
stroke types of which there aren’t many, but enough to be differenciated so you won’t be confused by what seem to be the same characters!
stroke order basically for a better handwriting and also you’ll remember the overall character better, if you know the standardized stroke order
I hope I could help with your first steps of learning how to write and read Chinese characters (pronunciation, as you could see, is a whole other chapter)!
