I just spent my whole afternoon cracking my brains to set 5 Subject-verb agreement questions and 1 vocabulary cloze for the final year exam. I was creating value but it’s the kind of value that’s short-lived because the chances of my colleagues using that final year exam for revision for their students are as slim as getting a 10k sat zap on Stacker News.
So what should I do to elevate the value I contribute to the world today? I have been putting my Learn Chinese with Sensei series on a hiatus because I feel like I must be in the right mental space to impact my non-Chinese friends something meaningful.
But heck. Let me keep it simple, stupid. Here’s a phrase that I adore very much: 自由人 (zì yóu rén).
Yes, it’s a picture of me wearing a tee with 自由人 in Okinawa, Japan. In fact, I bought this tee there.
And yes, I know the question on your mind. Well, 自由人 is one of those collections of characters that make sense in Japanese. In Japanese, it is pronounced as jiyūjin.
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. What does it mean, anyway?!!
Well, 自由 means freedom and 人 means person, so 自由人 means a free man!
Okinawa feels differently from the rest of Japan. Many Japanese cities boast modern conveniences and ancient heritage sites, but because the locals behave so politely to you and each other, you wonder whether they are socially conditioned to be nice or are being their authentic selves.
No such qualms in Okinawa. This picturesque prefecture exists on island time, and the shop assistants talk to customers like long-lost buddies. Coupled with the spectacular natural scenery, it evokes tranquil vibes, which is what being free is all about!
I still have this tee in my wardrobe even though I bought it in 2017. It has survived round after round of outfit culling.
And of course, because you are on Stacker News, I know that the ideology of freedom is important to you as well.
Hail, all 自由人 here!
I've long wondered how your dictionaries are organized. We have a phonetic alphabet, with only a couple dozen characters. It's easy enough to put words in alphabetical order.
My understanding is that there are thousands of Chinese characters and some are not widely known. If you come across an unfamiliar character, how do you look up its meaning?
The Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language has a set of phonetic characters, called Zhu Yin (注音) that can sound out every possible character. So dictionaries pre-CCP are organized using the phonetic set. The idea is probably that if you can speak the language and know the phonetic set, you can find the character. Also Mandarin was used because it was the most commonly and widely spoken / understood dialect.
The post CCP dictionaries that I used from China when I was a kid were organized according to Pin Yin (拼音). The CCP mapped the phonetic characters to the English alphabet, and the characters are organized according to alphabetical order based on each word's phonetic representation. The idea is the same, if you can sound out the character, you can find the character.
There is often also a prefix in the dictionary that has all the characters organized according to the "stem" of the character, we call 部首, then the remaining strokes to complete the word. Each character's page is listed in the dictionary. That way, if you run into a word you don't know how to say and don't know its meaning, you can look it up by "stem" plus stroke. See pic below.
https://m.stacker.news/43943
Ok, so the part I was missing is that even though Mandarin characters are not necessarily phonetic, there are phonetic rules that tell the reader how an unfamiliar character should sound.
Characters are unified amongst dialects, but pronunciation is different. Different characters could sound different or similar or same under different dialects. There are also specific characters that are only used by certain dialects.
The zhuyin / pinyin system is the phonetic symbols / alphabet plus rules to sound out every character in Mandarin. Then there are many many dialects in China, some with more tones and some with less tones etc etc.
The Chinese language is all so complicated...
I didn’t know about 注音! I only learnt 拼音 in school.
Am I right to assume that people in Taiwan use 注音 to piece together a sentence, find a word, etc?
Zhuyin was a KMT project and Pinyin was a CCP project. That is why Taiwan still teaches Zhuyin. I don't believe there was a standard phonetics system during the empire days. I could be wrong though and please correct me if I am.
Simplified Chinese is also a CCP project; a project that I personally don't really like, because I think the traditional characters look better and still has their roots coming from the hieroglyphs.
Isn't the same way than for every dictionary? Rolling dices and check the resulting index until it matches the word you're looking for. I mean.. how else could it be?
Somehow I imagine you rolling dices n smoking cigars haha
The cigar helps to cope, this searching method can be a little time consuming...
That's not how phonetic alphabet dictionaries work. We have an arbitrary order of the characters that everyone learns as a child. From there, it's perfectly predictable where a word will be in the dictionary.
I'm asking this question because they have characters that people are unfamiliar with and would therefor not know the order of.
But then how you do with the dices?
..I was just trolling :P
As far as I know, they do have to use dice, but probably not.
This relates to my question. #637190
I asked one of my Chinese friends this in grad school, but his English wasn't great and I was never able to understand his answer.
It's a good question, I'd never thought of it. It's best to wait for an answer from locals. 🤠
Characters are composed of two parts. The radical and the phonetic part.
There are about 200 radicals.
Back when I learned Chinese, it was the pre-tablet era, and traditional characters were organized by radical... so I used to look up the characters by first looking up the radical and then search from there after adding the phonetic part to it. The phonetic subdivision was based on the number of strokes with the characters with the least number of strokes coming first.
But best to let a local confirm. There might have been other ways to organize dictionaries that I am not aware of.
Nowadays of course, you can just write it on the screen of your tablet and it'll recognize it.
Thanks. Wouldn't Korean script follow the same logic?
Korean is completely different. The Korean alphabet is phonetic with 24 letters and can be learned in a few hours.
That being said, a subset of Chinese characters were part of the written word in Korea for a long time. Now kids don't have to learn them anymore.
Interesting, a Korean friend of mine told me it was similar enough to Chinese that he could read some Chinese writing. Of course there's a good chance he was just having some fun at my expense.
Both @south_korea_ln and @gnilma have given excellent responses. To add on, I like to use the pin yin (phonetic representation) of the character. Let’s say 自 (zi). I dive straight to the zi portion of the dictionary. Then, because Mandarin has four tones, I will then search for this word 自 via its tone (zì). It will take me about a minute to find a word that I am more or less acquainted with.
In regard to obscure words whose readings I don’t know, I used to scan them with an app. Then, I extracted the unfamiliar vocabulary and pasted them onto the search bar for Google to figure out the phonics. Only then can I use the phonetic reading to get the meaning of the unfamiliar word. It’s quite troublesome - and I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I have stopped learning new words. I blame it on parenting haha
What is the legal definition of 人? Are man and person different characters?
I was curious about the question. Here's my limited understanding.
人 rén - generic 法人 fă rén - legal entity (artificial person; body corporate;juridical person; legal entity) opposite to: 自然人 - zìrán rén (natural person, in a legal sense)
thanks how about - living man
I'm reaching my limited depth here, but here's we go..
Life, as we know it, is characterized of written in Chinese language (simplified) like:
生活 shenghuo (it's pretty 1 to 1 with 'life' in all its senses in English. As a noun or can be used as an adjective. So, we can make 生人 or 活人 which I believe is interchangeable.
Now, for the purpose of designating a living man, (in the sense of a legal living person) often there is the use of 人身 (living body of a human being; person)
My dictionary cites an example:
人身 renshen - living man 不可 buke - cannot 侵犯 qinfan - violate, infringe (upon) invade..
人身不可侵犯 - inviolability of the person.
also, searching out that sense we have:
人身安全 - renshen anquan - personal safety 人身保护令 - renshen baohuling - habeas corpus 人身权 - renshenquan - right (as in personal, or human rights) 人身自由 - renshen ziyou - personal freedom (or liberty); freedom of person
Thanks for researching so deeply!
I doubt that we say 生人 because 陌生人 (stranger) has the character 生.
Let me teach you an idiom: 人山人海 (literal: person mountain person sea). It refers to a crowded place
You might be right there, 生人 and 陌生人 are both unfamiliar person / stranger. I was just browsing. I suppose that the literary (or literal) meaning can be somewhat meaningless in the vernacular.
I mean, if you think of the default of not-knowing a person before becoming familiar with them, they are a stranger, or, a living person. Just that we don't say, 'hi living person!'
You don't say 生人 in Mandarin, you might in other dialects. 活人 is the correct term for living person in Mandarin. If it's specifically a man, then it's 活男人.
https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E7%94%9F%E4%BA%BA
It has the meaning of living person, and is also grammatically correct, but with dialects, you just say things a certain way. 生人 might be correct in written form, but we do not say that when speaking the language, at least not when speaking Madarin or Cantonese. I'm fluent in both dialects, so I know. But different dialects say things differently, so there might be a dialect that call "living person" 生人; however, I only know Mandarin and Cantonese, so I don't know which dialect would say that.
Sure, I also said that too. I have never heard it said but when asked 'how to say x' or 'do you speak x' this often also implies the knowledge of the diction. I.e, the word or character used to communicate. I have no doubt that peopldo not say this in modern China, colloquially.
Mobile dictionary: pleco
Sorry for not being precise! 人 refers to person. If I want to say a man, I have to add another character: 男人 Woman: 女人 Good person: 好人 Bad person: 坏人
自由人 should then be a free person, but because the collocation free man was so ingrained in my mind, I used that interpretation without thinking further
thanks what about human being
I've always been curious about the 'design' of Chinese characters. Is there any logic to the 'design' and its meaning?
There is! Let me think of something that will illustrate the ‘design’ well n get back to you!
I like 晶 to illustrate that...
好 is maybe a better example. The radical of a "woman" next to the phonetic part for "child", their combination meaning “good”. On my phone now, not sure how to write the different parts separately to illustrate my point better.
女 子
haha, thanks
Great choice. Especially since I have a boy and a girl haha
"good" as in "that's ok" or "good" as in "good person"?
Both.
But here the etymology works best for the latter.
The radical of the character can tell you what kind of word it is. For instance, 泳 and 池 are words related to water because of the three strokes on the left. I guess they resemble drops of water. 💦 What I don’t know is the process in which these radicals came about. I just learnt the radicals by heart without bothering to find out about their history. Haha
Here’s an example of how the character for hands, 手 was used by Tokyo Hands as inspiration for its logo.
https://m.stacker.news/43957
A lot of these radicals came from hieroglyphs. The characters are usually classified into 6 categories:
Check out this Wikipedia article for details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification
Wow! You asked it, you got it!
I don't agree that a 10k sat zap on Stackers News is slim now. Rather, I see posts with high value, like yours, getting zapped with 10k more often. Even one post yesterday got zapped a 15k sats.
Congratulations!
I feel guilty. I'm just along for the ride!
Haha!! You can zap my comment and I can zap the post for you!
Solution.Solution.
Or I can zap cryot's reply. Let's see how this plays out. I'll zap you
I've done it for you.
Wow! I think this is the first instance of Middleman Zapper on SN!
https://m.stacker.news/43892
Me too, thank you @cryotosensei 🙏
You can also zap me, I can also see your sats zapped on the post!
自由就是一切 . I am learning so quickly with the help of Google. Haha. Please start with alfabets.
You learn fast! Indeed, freedom is everything
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
I am going to practice writing 自由人
Cool. Calligraphy is a great meditative practice
Marvelled that every expression is a poem like a universe in a pin head, thank you for bringing this to us! :)
Never anticipated such keen interest in my mother tongue! So invigorating
You chose very interesting examples, this short posts of yours on the subject have that "youtube short" addictive effect, I would read this daily
Rare indeed...
I am a bit dumbfounded
Good things happen to good people, it seems.
hilarious
Great choice of material today. My western brain tried to look at those characters to find some symbolic manifestation of freedom. No luck, unless you see it as a box with a guy climbing out of the top and breaking free? Doesn't quite work.
I may be wrong, this is the way I always imagined it. Maybe Sensei can fact check the etymology.
田 +丨= 由 (field - enter and leave) 自 + 由 + 人 = self (not sure the etymology) + reason (own reason to do things) + person
A person with own reasons for doing things is free. ps: the field is an aerial view.
You are spot on with the meaning break down. 自由 has a literal meaning of "self reason". And a person who do things for "self reason" is free.
It's doesn't have anything to do with entering and leaving the field. 由 existed way back.
https://m.stacker.news/44048
And it did not resemble 田.
https://m.stacker.news/44049
Nice reasoning though.
and thanks for showing my the true etymology. Super interesting.
Yeah, I tried to make that clear (but perhaps I did not) when I said the way I 'imagined' it which is useful as a strategy to employ, particularly as a second language learner.
The book I started learning Mandarin with [Tuttle] emphasizes this approach and I believe if you look at modern dictionaries today, the character does utilize those components from the 'field' radicle.
https://m.stacker.news/44050
Thank you for the breakdown! :)
That's really helpful, thanks.
Thanks for this. The aerial ps really helped too.
Sorry for getting late!
But, 迟到并不代表迟到
I read all the comments and get extra knowledge.
I would suggest you to hold this class once a week and tell pupils to come on time.
Learning Chinese is way hard and is one of the hardest language dispite of your are learning Keep learning
Hail uou
https://m.stacker.news/43918