Humbled by Hanzi

Learning Hanzi (Chinese characters) isn't the only thing that humbles me. The fact of the matter is I often don't really know what I'm eating, I'm not always 100% sure who is talking on the other end of the cell phone until I'm part way into it, and I frequently miss big chunks of what they're saying. All this is very humbling. So, before returning to the mysteries of Hanzi, I want to share today's mystery. I was having lunch in one of the school canteens with a linguist buddy of mine (who speaks English as well as I speak Chinese--not very well) when she commented on what I had selected to eat. I'm used to eating many unusual (to me) mushrooms and small plants, so it was with considerable surprise that I discovered this dish consists of cocks' combs:

But more humbling, perhaps, is the ruled notebook used when learning to write Chinese characters (Hanzi), reminiscent of dotted lined paper used in second grade. I feel like a primary school child when sent to the blackboard to write a list of new vocabulary words in characters--but I love it. I love being a student, and I love learning this amazing visual/verbal art form that combines story, picture, history, symbol. For me anyway, it requires Zen-like concentration to make the characters, arranging them just so in the tiny space and then distinguishing each character from all the other characters making use of some of the same radicals.

You might be able to make out a word or two with Roman letters in the notebook above (above all but the very last rows of characters) : "ma," "ne" "na," "chi" "a," "jiao," and "tu," the Pinyin version of the characters (but without tones--sorry). Foreigners who are used to a Roman alphabet have Pinyin as a bridge, but we are weaned from Pinyin as soon as we can make sense of the characters. The Vietnamese and Korean students in my class have a little easier time with Chinese characters.

I find myself in a near meditative trance writing scores of these characters, trying to memorize them. As you can see on the blackboard below, one radical might be repeated in lots of different words, but often the radical is associated with a meaning, like the caozitou, which has something to do with "grass" and appears in the character for many fruits--but also in the character for "England" and "English," I don't know why. Similarly, the three tiny strokes called san dian are often associated with water, as in the "hai" part of  "Shanghai," a seaside city.

The character for "first"--"xian"--shows up in the character for "choose" and "wash," so for a while I got these very different words mixed up.  But then I learned to notice more things, like those three dian (associated with water) in the character for "wash." The characters for "thousand," "I," and "look for" at first looked very similar to me--and I almost needed a magnifying class to distinguish them. And sometimes the exact same character does have radically different meanings.

Learning this millennia-old amazing art form is a challenge for my weary brain, but I utterly love studying it. Sometimes you have the etymology of the word packed in via pictograms, sometimes ideograms, all mixed with phono-semantic compounds.

Thank goodness the pragmatic founders of the People's Republic of China wanted to simplify Hanzi to promote literacy and to make it easier for folks like me to get a handle on writing characters; however, the more complex traditional form is still used in Taiwan. I'd really be in trouble there.

Another time, I might write  a little more about the evolution of this amazing form of writing, from the "oracle bones" (those ancient carvings on pieces of bones and turtle shells) to the current simplified Hanzi (easier to learn but harder to associate with the original pictures). I might also comment on the idea of a dictionary--imagine what a Chinese dictionary is like, organized by the number of strokes. No alphabet, remember.

Now I have to shift from student mode back to teacher mode--I need to respond to about seventy audio-files from my sophomore Conversational English students and about the same number of papers from my senior Academic Writing students. It will be a long weekend. . .