User Comments - toianw
toianw
Posted on: Lucky and Unlucky Numbers in Chinese
December 8, 2011 at 4:33 PM"I think you'd have a hard time arguing with the fact that it is precisely 50%."
I'll take on the challange :-)
As we know, a Chinese syllable is comprised of three parts: the initial, the final and the tone. As a wise man once said, "Two out of three ain't bad."
Posted on: The Seven Year Itch 3: Extramarital Involvement
November 30, 2011 at 7:29 AMAnother small problem. There's no vocabulary list on the text only version of the simplified PDF.
Posted on: Character Amnesia
November 28, 2011 at 11:31 AMHi Keth,
First of all, this is not a crazy idea at all. I’ve read that more than 90% of modern Chinese characters contain some kind of phonetic element, so being able to recognise the phonetic part of the character is an extremely useful tool for helping you remember characters.
The good news is that the more characters you learn (after a certain point), the more patterns you’ll notice, and the easier it is to “guess” the pronunciation of a new word. The tones are more tricky (I’d be interested to know if Chinese people or people with a greater level of literacy than me can make a guess as to the tone just from the phonetic element of the character) but the important point is knowing and recognising the phonetic element (in Chinese, I think they call it the 声旁 (shēngpáng)) will help a lot to lock characters into your memory. And the more characters you know, the easier it is to learn new characters because you’re already familiar with the most common phonetics.
For instance, in the examples of 吧 and 啊 that you gave, the phonetic element is actually the other part. The 口 here is the “meaning” part, which you will often see as a “meaning” radical in these kinds of particles. You can find the 巴 phonetic in other words such as 把 (bǎ – a handle) 爸 (bà – father) 疤 （bā – a scar）, with the other part giving a clue to the meaning of each of the characters.
The bad news is that Mandarin pronunciation has changed a fair bit over the years, so the phonetic is not always reliable. Interestingly (and relating to your other point) I’ve also read that some of the dialects spoken further to the south may be closer to the ancient Chinese pronunciations than 普通话 due to the influence of speakers of other languages on the northern dialects of Chinese – but I’m not sure how reliable my sources are!
I have found this website (Chinese etymology) a very useful aid. You can enter a character and it will give you a breakdown of the meaning and phonetic elements (as well as pictures showing how the characters have changed over the years).
This may also be of interest, from the same website:
“There are about 800 characters that are used as phonetics in modern Chinese. About a third of them can be readily recognized. Another third can be recognized by literate Chinese and yet another third are problematic and can only be analyzed.”
Posted on: A Good Book
November 19, 2011 at 12:18 AMThat's right.
Posted on: Measure Words for Animals
November 17, 2011 at 6:15 AMHi Chris,
I don't think there's anything very special going on with the grammar here. 胆子 is a noun (courage or guts). It collocates with 大 or 小. So you can say 胆子很大 or 胆子很小。
Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 2)
November 13, 2011 at 6:14 PMSo I guess we can take 18% as a reasonable estimate - or at least an upper limit - of the number who speak putonghua (or something very close) as their native tongue.
And just under 50% cannot communicate effectively (I can't find any info about what the standard used to measure this was) in mandarin - though the vast majority of these will be older people.
Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 2)
November 13, 2011 at 5:58 PMIt doesn't entirely answer your question, but back in 2004 the government published results of a survey of Mandarin use in China. A summary of the results was publised in the China Daily here.
In Summary:
53 per cent of the population are able to communicate in putonghua.
18 per cent speak Mandarin while talking to family members.
42 per cent speak at school, work or when playing woth others.
66 per cent of urban residents speak putonghua compared to 45 per of rural residents.
The survey also showed that the young have better putonghua fluency, with just 31 per cent of those aged 60 to 69 able to speak it, while the figure more than doubles among those younger than 29.
Posted on: Chinese Dialects (Part 1)
November 12, 2011 at 5:23 AM"There is no lesson dedicated specifically for that"
Try this one:
Intermediate - Bank Transactions
Posted on: National Stereotypes
December 12, 2011 at 2:36 PMHi mate,
Try this link