Your Favorite Character

These days I quite like characters with 母, e.g. 海. When in 上海, I always wrote the latter character the wrong way until I finally looked it up and learned how to do it properly.

Has anyone tried to use a 毛笔 for writing characters? Does that help getting into the right rhythm of stroke order and movements and all?

Ni Hao, TaiPan. Steve Miller's song "The Joker" is the inspiration for my name. "Pompatous" is a made up word with no real meaning. There's more information here:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_065.html

Hi, pulosm - the correct reading of the the character is "dǎng" meaning "party", "association" or "club". Get it? :) One of these days I'll hire a babysitter and take the missus to check it out.

Also, pompatous. I don't think I get the bang/党 thing. Could you explain?

pompatous...we traditionalists like to keep the "heart" in the word for "love" ;-)

女 is breathtakingly beautiful simplified or complex. :)

A hippopotamus-sized pom-pom?

Dude! your name is pompatous. There's that steve miller band song where he sings "... the pompatous of love" for decades I've wondered what the f*** is a pompatous! What does your name mean? please tell me.

There is a nightclub I pass by every day with the character 党 as its name. The sign indicates that the name of the place is "bāng". After a bit of frustration, I found the awesome website www.chinese-tools.com and figured out the real pronunciation & meaning, and got the joke. That character became a favorite because I was proud of solving the puzzle. I am just a newbie, but I've read enough to appreciate how fortunate I am to have incredible modern learning resources such as ChinesePod. So far, the favorite character that I have learned is 爱 (or 愛, for you traditionalists)

凯 This one always catches my attention, plus its one of the characters of my name.

涛 .. always makes me think of a rainy beach and big waves.

... I meant 'characters'

after today's visit to the ChinesePod Factory (as henning says), I confirm that Jenny Zhu and Vera Zhang are my favourite Chinese character. I wish I could memorize their impeccable pronunciation too.

I always thought the most difficult thing about reading newspapers is the way they are written, i.e., abbreviated and formalistic.

It's difficult to say. Check out this link for an ongoing discussion:

http://chinesepod.com/connections/viewpost/Kyle/connect/Graded+Readers+for+Intermediate++learners

About half way through you'll see one of sputnik's posts which seems to be pretty authoritative / comprehensive. He ran a cool little program that punched back the following results:

Results:

a) total 3330 汉字, unique 1212, more than once 595

b) total 9374 汉字, unique 1960 , appear more than once 1134

c) total 49719 汉字, unique 3588, more than once 2622

Looking at his analysis, about 2600 characters will get your through most newspapers that aren't too 专业, or specialized.

Great job! 1500 is a lot. I think 3000 is about 80% of all the characters ever used or something? Is that right?

Yeah, makes sense.

I'm up to about 1500 characters now (about half way to a newspaper, or so they say).

Now that you mention it, I do find myself doing a lot of guesswork as you described above, and about half the time I can at least guess the pinyin (without the tone) to look it up in an electronic dictionary.

Well, I will say, using that tool presumes you know the spoken language better than the written language, which is the case with most of us, right? So, you know that "gou" means "dog," so when you see the character you can guess it is dog because between context, the animal radical, and the 句 part, you can figure it out.

I don't know how far along you are in reading Chinese, but it is a trick that is super helpful when you come across characters you don't know. I think as with all langauge acquisition, it is best to accept and use the patterns, then to try to reinvent the wheel.

Especially with simplified characters, it would be odd to ignore the patterns. As much as I don't love them, the beauty of simplified characters is the use of this tool. For example, I never remember 膚. It's hard. But 肤 is easy. Body part that sounds like "fu"...skin!

This is how it is best used in my mind. I see this sentence from one of the chinesepod dialogues, for e.g.: 有些人胆子真大. I know all the characters except for the fourth, let's say (it is probably the "hardest", right?). In trying to guess at its meaning, I can look at the radical (body part) and the 旦 component. Even if I don't know THIS character, I know I have seen it in 但 and that that is pronounced "dan." What word (from my oral knowledge of the language) would work there, might sound like "dan" (or "tan", a related sound) and has something to do with the body. Ohhhh, "dan3zi3" or guts/gall/bladder/courage. Makes sense! All this happens so fast after a while.

Then you see: 担 (dan4/1=carry), 坦 (tan3=smooth, level, candid), 袒 (tan3), etc.

And, maybe you can't figure it out by the radical, but if you can pronounce it aloud, it might trigger in your mind a close sound that will tell you what the word is. The hardest part with Chinese is that you know how to say many more words than you can read and many many more than you can write. Using these tricks (they aren't even tricks, they are the ACTUAL reasons the characters are written as they are), you can turn a meaningless blob into some sound that may or may not help you remember a word you have HEARD but never seen. This is helpful when you are out and about and you don't have your dictionary, computer, etc. nearby.

Just my thoughts.

It's just always seemed to me that the radical / pronunciation component aren't always 100% apparent nor useful.

Yes, there are examples such as pulosm's where the meaning may be deciphered. But how do I know it's a dog from the animal radical and not horse? or gou3 and not gou4? Or not ju4? These are the nuances that, in my mind, make learning that particular approach fruitless.

pulosm, you're right about the phonetic part, I've used the trick a few times when ordering at restaurants, it tends to work except for the tone (which really does make the difference). As to the radical, again on menus it does help figuring out that something is a bird or veg but that's about it :-)

Mnemonics I never use, as Kyle I learn those characters as one piece just as try and I do with words, tones and all.

Kyle, I would say the radicals and the other parts of the character are even MORE important as you get more of a background in the language. Using the "sound" of the character plus the radical as a "hint" is probably the best tip out there. For example, the word "dog" (gou) was one we all probably memorized. BUT, if you look at it, you can see "animal" radical plus sound part. What sound? "gou1" (okay, also "ju"). But whenever you see that thing, it is probably true that the character sounds like "gou", like the word for enough "gou4", which has "duo" (a lot) plus the sound hint "gou1". See?

I stopped learning radicals / trying to devise clever nenomics after character 300, and instead just starting memorizing whole characters in context.

It can't be that every single character actually tells a logical story that can be used to accurately decode its meaning, can it?

I almost do not dare dare to say to speak up honestly, because I definately like all those body-radical-characters best. They might stand for rather vulgar vocab, but they are so immensely graphic. Rice in a body? A cave in a body? Water in a body? To the point.

unfortunately I am not computer-literate enough to play around and make yaks do back-flips

hehe, thanks wildyaks. You should make your yak do a back-flip. Then I'd definitely vote for you. ;-)

Ken and Jenny are both exceptionally photogenic, so I'd have to say that their avatars are pretty good.

I also like the Mac effect that johnb did on his.

sparechange, you just have a knack for choosing nice avatars. Liked your former one, too.

Maybe we should have a vote on who has the most creative, nicest looking, dumbest, ... avatar.

I like that turtle

Maybe 思 is my favourite :-p

I don't really know.

Usually 7 is my favourite number, but in Chinese it's probably 五 - or 亿 ;-).

If I was to pick a favourite traditional form, it'll probably go with 龍.

Thanks Doc!

I created the animation in Photoshop. First, I selected the two little "feet" and separated them from the rest of the character so I could move them back and forth. Then I just nudged the whole character up a little with each frame of animation.

I was just looking for an excuse to not do some work. ;-)

sparechange

that's an AWESOME avatar! how did you get it to do that?

I'm learning both simplified and traditional for practical reasons. From an artistic standpoint however, I agree with pulosm. There is no substitute for traditional characters.

pulosm, do you do calligraphy? Just wondering, since we're on the subject. I would really like to get into it, but being smack in the middle of Nowhere, USA puts me at a bit of a disadvantage.

Jenny, you win! (Get it? Ha ha ha)

Bazza, maybe I am still hurt. Zhao laoshi took off all those points for using "traditional" characters. Yes, it was 7 years ago, but still.

Also, I can "do" simplified characters, but I will never EVER think that calligraphy using simplified characters is okay. I have to draw the line somewhere.

I don't really prefer any particular character but I really like writing 马 and other characters that it's a part of like 吗 or 妈。

pulosm, to fully love the Chinese language, you have love both simplified and traditional equally. ;)

my favorite character ever since I started with chinese is 常， it looks as a smart person who just came out with an idea and that is what the lines on top represent to me. I also like words that have water on the side like 波，浪，湿， 等等。

Mine is 赢, which to me is like a transformer of Chinese characters. It looks ostentatiously elaborate as a whole whole each part is a functioning character on its own. I still get a kick out of how the teacher taught us to learn the character: say 亡、口、月、贝、凡。

sorry, it flaked out on me and posted twice.

hehe...new avatar in honor of my favorite character :D

I have waaaay too much time on my hands....

hehe...new avatar in honor of my favorite character :D

I have waaaay too much time on my hands....

Bazza, I find simplified characters unappealing to look at. Only people who learn them first think that they look nice. They are shells of their former selves and have no meaning. I mean, they took the "heart" out of love! ;-)

In Beijing, my professor would mark off points on my essays for using traditional characters. That's just nuts.

头 means nothing.

頭's left side is the word "dou" which gives you the phonetic clue, because "dou" and "tou" are similar. It's even more similar to the sound in other dialects/langauges of Chinese (or Vietnamese for that matter: đầu is "head" and đậu is "bean"--the only difference is the tone!). The right side of the character

I don't know that many characters yet, but so far I get a real kick out of the pictographic ones.... like our friend, the tortoise: 龜

I've always loved 点 and 常. Even before I started studying Chinese. They looked like comics to me: a bug 点 running over the paper. And a friendly person 常 on a bad hair day... And I still love the geometry of 面.

How can you not like 头? It's the perfect character for head.

I like 頭. I don't know why. I don't like its simplified cousin 头 at all, though.

粥　Ｉ　ｃａｎ’ｔ　ｓａｙ　Ｉ　ｈａｖｅ　ａ　ｆａｖｏｒｉｔｅ，　ｂｕｔ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒ　ｃａｍｅ　ｔｏ　ｍｉｎｄ．

We could include favourite words as well.

I think the word for tap (faucet) - 水龙头 is great. The "water dragon head". :)

I'm going to have to say: 缘

I like FogHorn LegHorn but I'm just a loony toons kinda guy ;-)

Never thought about it. I have favourite English words, favourite Italian words, favourite any kind of words... I love words. But never thought about characters...

谢 is one of my favourites.