My chicken-scratch Chinese

After reading about how many people in China are forgetting how to write Chinese characters because of the rise of electronic gadgets on which people simply pick the characters from a list, I decided to brush up on my Chinese writing. I was writing at a fifth-grade level when I left China, but by now I’ve forgotten how to write most of the characters I knew due to lack of practice (reading Chinese and writing Chinese are two very different things, with the latter being much more difficult). So one night last week, I found the text to the Chinese textbook I used in first grade and started copying the chapters by hand.

Once I got going, a surprising number of characters came back to me, and I was able to remember how to write most characters in the (albeit simple) text by the second or third time I encountered a particular one. In about an hour or so, I filled up two-and-a-half pages in a spiral notebook and actually felt pretty proud of myself. The experience also gave me a new (or rediscovered) appreciation for the Chinese writing system, especially how visual it is. Obviously, being a system that began as ideograms, there are some very obvious examples, such as this character, which means mountain:

But the visual nature goes well beyond that simple resemblance between the character and the object it represents. For a good illustration of this, take this character, which means “to break apart by hand”:

As you can see, it’s made up of three distinct components. Let’s look at the left and right parts:

If they look similar, it’s because they are both stylized versions of the same character:

… which means “hand”.

As for the component in the center, when by itself, it means to split apart:

So put the three together, and you have a character that literally says:

Left hand — split apart — right hand

When I see this character, I can literally see two hands pulling something apart.

Another example

Take this string of characters from another chapter:

These are six characters grouped into three pairs, with each pair consisting of what you would consider to be a word in English. You probably notice that these six characters all share a common component:

The translation of each pair of characters: butterfly, dragonfly, centipedes.

And that left component that all six characters share? It’s a stylized variation of this character:

… which means “insect”.

Now, take the first character in the sequence and compare it to this one:

The right two-thirds of each character are identical, so there’s got to be a relationship between them, right? In this case, the only similarity between them is the way they are pronounced (hu). In fact, the right two-thirds of each character is pronounced hu. As for their meanings, while the first one means butterfly, the second character means lake. Just as you can guess at the meaning of the first character by the component that means insect, you can guess the meaning of the second character by its left component:

… which means water.

This is how one can often deduce the approximate meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters.