Jason
Resource for writing Mandarin Is there a good resource for writing in Mandarin?
Feb 21, 2017 2:38 AM
Answers · 8
The third type of character is "two components that are put together to give it meaning". For example, 明 which in the word 明天 means tomorrow, comes from 日 the sun and 月 the moon put together. If you have a day with sun, and then night with moon, then you have another day - tomorrow. The other meaning of 明 is "bright". The fourth, and by far the most common type of character, is when one part gives the character its meaning and one part gives a character its pronunciation, which I believe are called phonosemantic compounds. Basically , some characters that all look really similar have similar pronunciations - watch this for reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8joWLPGaTA. 請 情 清 青 精 靖 婧 晴. These are called a phonetic series. The 青 is pronounced "qing1", and all others are related to this pronunciation, but their other components change. Watch the video, it explains it better. There are others, too, like 喝 遏 謁 揭 歇 偈 is another set that springs to mind. Can you see how they all have a common component? Anyway, bearing in mind that some characters have sound components, where does the meaning come from? There are things called "radicals" in Chinese. A radical is a "meaning component" to a character. For example anything with 疒 suggests illness 病 疾 痼 痠 etc. Basically, after you have enough characters, you might be able to guess how to pronounce a character. 鸚鵡 is the example I use. 嬰兒 means baby and is pronounced "ying1 er2", 武器 means wepon and is pronounced "wu3 qi4". 鳥 means bird. You can from this guess that the pronunciation might be ying1 wu3 (or something similar, they don't always match up perfectly like this one) and it is a type of bird. You'd be right! 鸚鵡 means parrot. Does that make more sense now? Oh, the best way of memorising characters is simply writing them by hand over and over again. Best of luck in learning Chinese!
February 21, 2017
what do you think a good resource for writing in Mandarin is like?
February 21, 2017
This is probably not what you want to hear, but a pen and paper? If you are asking how to learn and write characters, then I suggest the following. You want to learn Chinese characters but don't know where to start. I myself would start from words that I am going to need like me 我 he 他 her 她 us 我們 them 他們 want 想 need 要 go 去 come 來 China 中國 America 美國 etc. Oh, 廁所 toilet is always a good one to know lol. If you are really at a loss for where to start, then you can use a frequency list like this: http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html and simply work through the list systematically. Let's take the first character as an example, cause you are gonna need that one - 我 . Use a website like this http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_english_dictionary.html to look the character up, an animation showing you how to write the character will appear on the screen. I suggest you copy it, you'll probably have to watch it a few times to get the hang of it. You can use normal lined paper, or you can use something called 米格紙, which is what school kids is China use (it looks like this http://xuanpaper.cn/cn/images/mg2.jpg) which can be useful for getting your proportions right. I would recommend learning at least the first 500 - 1000 by rote, as they come up regardless of what you read. As for breaking down characters and understanding them... There is a YouTube channel for this I swear. Wait one. https://www.youtube.com/user/theforeverastudent/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=p this one. Some of the videos here are pretty interesting. There are a few different types of Chinese characters. There are characters that look like stuff, called 象形字 (lit. look like image characters). Characters like 日 sun (this used to be a circle back in ancient times) 月 moon (this looked more like a moon back in the day). The second type is another type of 象形字. They express abstract concepts, and aren't literally pictures of stuff. 一 is one 二 is two 三 is three. 上 is on and 下 is below etc.
February 21, 2017
You can see the chinese movies or talk with me
February 21, 2017
youtube channel: Yangyang Cheng would be a choice. Also, you can watch movies and TV shows on www.youku.com or www.iqiyi.com.
February 21, 2017
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