How to break down this question if your answer is ""?
Question
Some days ago, one of my students shared with me his experience of reading Chinese texts: 'Since the sentences have no space, I get confused whether a character is part of a word or is part of a grammatical structure'. Then I've start to wonder how we Chinese read and how could we help our students to read more effectively.
Now I would like to explain the reason why our students
frequently have this issue.
Characters & Words
First, as I mentioned in previous article, the Chinese language is different from any other language. In English, a letter is the smallest morpheme. They often convey no meaning, except some special letters. A letter or sequence of letters make a word, something that conveys
information. In Chinese, on the contrary, a character is the smallest morpheme, but it also conveys meaning in some way. But, in Chinese, we often need more than one character to make a word, and that's why sometimes reading Chinese might be confusing at the beginning. So, my suggestion for beginners, is to break down each word into characters, and then try to understand each character. There are some words that cannot be broke down into characters, an issue that will write about it in the future.
Sentences
Second, in Chinese sentences, differently from English ones, words have no spaces between them. That's why it is so important to know how to recognize each single words in a sentence, in order to break the sentence into smaller parts. Doing that will help you understand more clearly what you are reading.
The 'FRC' Method
for Learning Chinese Characters
In Chinese, sentences work like building blocks: first you have characters, then you have words and finally a sentence. After years of teaching experience, I believe that three main aspects deserve more attention when you are studying characters. I call them 'FRC'.
1. Frequently Used Character
In daily life, there are about 1000 frequently used characters. Beginners need around 200 of them, such as "n", "w", "de", "y", etc. How many frequently used characters you master and how fast you can recognize those characters are the basis for learning and reading fluently.
2. Radical
Generally, a Chinese character is made up of one or more pieces, some of which convey certain meaning are further defined as radicals. It is the so-called "bshu" in Chinese. There are only more than one hundred radicals. When you find out some new words or characters, the radical of the character will help you guess what the meaning of the word or character is, and understand the sentence more clearly.
For instance, "d" and "ln" share the radical "", which indicates actions using a hand. We have designed many exercises for our students to help them recognize and understand Chinese radicals.
3.Confusing Characters
Some Chinese characters look alike, such as "rn" and "r", "kn" and "zhe", "zh" and "zhn". When one character is misunderstood, the meaning of the sentence will be harder to grasp. During our classes, we encourage students to create a little story of their own to distinguish two confusing characters. This adds fun to learning Chinese and has good results.
In the next part, I teach you how to learn words more effectively.
To be continued
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