雜項

(Note: This post is about people who only use pinyin only INSTEAD of writing in Chinese characters. This has nothing to do with people who use pinyin IMEs to type in Chinese or who use pinyin to show the pronunciation of words) Ok, so I met another pinyin-only learner today and I’ve finally had it. I’m making a post about it! I’m not going to go over all of the reasons why learning Mandarin with pinyin only is a bad idea, but I’m going to look at one reason in particular today: Pinyin ambiguity.

Today we are going to look at . Surprisingly this character is not included in most fonts, so don’t be alarmed if you cannot see it on your computer. I will be using an image instead of the actual character to avoid any problems. is pronounced tǐng. It is made up 丿(piě) and 土(tǔ, earth). Originally, this character was made from 人(rén, man, human) and 土(tǔ, earth) as you can see below.

Next on our list is a pair of characters that were merged into one in the simplification process. 髒(zāng, dirty) is a 形聲 made up of the semantic 骨(gǔ, bone) and the phonetic 葬(zàng). It’s pretty straight forward…an association of filth with bones. As an extra bonus, 葬 means to inter or bury the dead, so it has association with the meaning of 髒. Next is 臟. 臟(zàng, organ) is also a 形聲 made up of the semantic 肉(ròu, meat) on the left and the phonetic 藏(cáng, zàng) on the right.

Today’s character is 聖 which means “holy, sacred, saint, sage”. It is a 形聲 so let’s break it down. (It can also be considered a 會意) So we have 耳 along with 呈. It’s meaning is interpreted either as a 形聲 or a 會意. 形聲：The semantic component is 耳(ěr, ear) and the phonetic one is 呈(chéng) 會意：”the person who speaks 呈 into the ear 耳 – sage”. So how did they decide to simplify this one?

Hey guys, I just realized that I could allow anyone to leave comments on my posts, so go nuts now. You don’t need an account to do so anymore. I hope to get a lot of comments from now on 😀

So it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been thinking I should start doing 1 character per post, that way they are easier to read and they come more frequently. So let’s start with the character 发. What is it? Well, it’s two characters merged into one. In Traditional Chinese those two characters are 發 and 髮, and they both have two completely different meanings. I have found two different etymologies for the character 發, they both make sense to me, so I’ll post them both.

In this post I would like to show some characters that are a bit hard to distinguish when in the simplified script. If you glance at these, they could be easily confused. Here they are in the traditional script. There are more strokes, but they are much more easily distinguished. ※斗 is also a character in traditional characters, but I didn’t include it for aesthetics’ sake. In simplified, both 鬥 and 斗 were merged into one character, 斗.

This post may be removed. It is very poorly writtten (I did it at 4 A.M.). Don’t take everything in it was 100% correct and please mind any grammatical errors. Chinese is easy. It is! Not just Mandarin, but most versions of Sinitic languages are easy. How is this, you ask? Well, just think about it this way. In English we have prefixes and suffixes. We all know that “aqua” and “hydro” (depending on which origin you choose) both mean “water”.

Most of you know that Japanese uses “kanji” and that it has another writing system that is its own. There are 3 scripts in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji(漢字). The first two scripts are known collectively as kana and were both derived from Chinese characters. Kanji on the other hand, is a bit different. Kanji IS hanzi, that is to say, 漢字 is 漢字. However, the Japanese borrowed the symbols throughout different time periods, thus they are not all the same.

Hey all. So I haven’t been posting recently for several reasons. Firstly, I got a new netbook, so I no longer have to mooch off of my roommate’s. Secondly, I decided to make the switch to Ubuntu (Linux) and have left Windows to all of you guys. I have been enjoying it immensely and couldn’t be happier with it. Lastly, I have just started school up again, so my free time is somewhat limited now.