Differentiating characters - 或惑咸感

Hover over any underlined Chinese character to see the pinyin tooltip(note: if you are reading this in an RSS reader, you probably won't be able to see the pinyin tooltips, in which case you should click on the link to the original post.)

A big problem I've always had in reading and writing Chinese is characters which look so similar I can't tell them apart at first glance. It's not until I put the characters side by side and analyse them that I begin to grasp the subtle differences.

For example, look at these four characters - 或 咸 惑 感

At first glance they all look pretty similar, and you could be forgiven for confusing them with each other. But they all have different meanings:

或 - or
咸 - salty
惑 - be puzzled
感 - feel

Take a closer look. 或 consists of a 戈 radical with a 口 on top of a 一， while 咸 has the extra 丿stroke on the left hand side an the 口 is underneath the 一. 惑 and 感 are simply 或 and 咸 respectively, with a 心 radical added underneath.

I'm not going to suggest any mnemonic for remembering these characters, it's usually better to devise your own anyway. But I think just seeing them together like this and analysing their structure can help you to remember which is which. Either that or you'll be even more confused! Let me know. Here's a sentence using all the words so you can practice:

我喜欢吃咸的或者甜的菜，但这个味道让我感到迷惑不解
I like salty or sweet dishes, but this flavour leaves me perplexed

(I know the sentence is pretty meaningless, it's only here to show you the four characters together)

Tags: Chinese, Mandarin, Language, Chinese characters, CSL

Remembering Characters 2

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集 (gather; collection; volume)

The top part is 隹 （a kind of short-tailed bird), you probably know it already as the main part of 谁 (who).

The bottom part is 木 which here depicts a tree.

The original form of this character showed 3 of these birds (a gathering or collection) sitting on top of the tree: 雧 (if you can't make it out, try increasing your browser's text size in the View menu)

Related words:
集合 (gather together)
集会 (gathering; assembly)
集中 (concentrate; focus)

and another place you'll see this character is on your Chinese DVD collections, where it means episode (not to be confused with 季 (season), which has the same pronunciation.)

i.e. if you want to buy Lost Season 1, you need to look for 迷失 第一季, and when you look on the disc it might say 1 - 4 集 (episodes 1-4).

So when you're struggling to remember how to write the character for gather, just think of a gathering of birds in a tree and it will all come flooding back. (Remember there's only one bird now, not three - they had to kill off the other two . . . population control . . . or something.)

Tags: mandarin, chinese, chinese characters, etymology, language, china

Remembering characters 1

(note: if you are reading this in an RSS reader, you probably won't be able to see the pinyin tooltips, in which case you should click on the link to the original post.)

Recognizing characters becomes pretty easy after a while, but remembering how to write them is definitely one of the most challenging parts of learning Chinese. I find it becomes easier once you have some frame of reference. Then a once complex character suddenly becomes clear.

葬 - bury
葬礼 - funeral
火葬 - cremation
葬地 - grave

(sorry about the morbid theme!)

I always had trouble remembering how to write 葬 until my teacher pointed out the composition of the character. The top part is grass - 艹，the middle is a dead body - 死, and the bottom is a kind of stone table on which the body is laid to rest (this can be seen as a coffin). So the character is a picture of a body in a grave, and now you shouldn't have any trouble remembering how to write it! Hope that hasn't depressed you too much! I'll try a happier character next time.

(A book which I've found invaluable in learning to read and write Chinese is Remembering the Kanji, by James W. Heisig. It's actually for learning to read Japanese Kanji, but many of the characters are the same, and it will certainly give you some good ideas for memory techniques)

Tags: Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese characters, language