In several recent posts, we've been discussing the most efficient, least painful way to acquire facility with hanzi / kanji / hanja 漢字 ("Sinographs; Chinese characters"). Lord knows there are endless numbers of them and they are so intricately constructed that it is an arduous task to master the two thousand or so that are necessary for basic literacy.
It would be so much easier to learn the Sinographs if language pedagogues would provide phonetic annotations for each character. Better yet, the phonetic annotations should be divided into words with spaces between them according to the official orthographic rules.
John C. Wakefield, ed., Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning
Readers of Language Log know that I'm an ardent advocate of this vibrant language and will understand why I consider the publication of Cantonese as a Second Language a cause for celebration.
Two caveats:
1. It's a full-fledged language, not a mere "dialect".
2. You don't have to worry about the Sinographs when you learn it.
For the first time in my life, I closely observed someone inputting Korean on a cell phone. (I was sitting behind the person doing it on the train ride to the city this afternoon.) Of course, I don't know exactly how it works, but what I observed was very interesting.
First of all, the young woman's phone had a special feature I've never seen in any other type of inputting. Namely, she could use a little, built-in, popup, electronic magnifying glass to hover over a particular syllable block that she had composed to inspect it carefully to see that she had formed it correctly. She did this fairly often.
Next, she seemed to spend a lot of time typing and retyping individual syllable blocks to make sure she got them right.
Since so much of learning to read and write Chinese characters depends upon mindless repetition, writing them countless times, some bright people in the age of AI have finally seized upon a way to escape from the drudgery: training a robot to write the characters endlessly for them.
My background is that I grew up in Taiwan learning Traditional Chinese and now most of what I use in my professional life is in Simplified Chinese. How exactly should the character of hē, "to drink," be written?
I grew up learning that the character inside the bottom-right enclosure is 人. Now I see that it is mostly written as 匕. I don't know when this changed, and I don't think it's a matter of Traditional vs Simplified, either, as I see both versions in Traditional writing as well. This Wiktionary entry illustrates the confusion nicely. No one I know has noticed this change, which leads me to think that I'm either losing my mind or experiencing the Mandela Effect.
Anthony Clayden wonders whether there is "some visual pun going on with the Chinese characters" in the design of the symbol of the TRA, which "features a rail profile inscribed within two semi-circles."
A few days ago, I wrote the following titles on the blackboard in my "Poetry and Prose" class:
Dà Táng Sānzàng qǔjīng shīhuà 大唐三藏取經詩話 (Poetic Tale of Tripitaka of the Great Tang Fetching Scriptures)
Yóuxiān kū 遊仙窟 (The Grotto of Playful Transcendants)
Guānshìyīn yìngyàn jì 觀世音應驗記 (Records of the Verifications of Responses by Avalokiteśvara)
As I was rapidly writing the strokes of the characters — click click click tick tick tack tack click clack tick tack — I suddenly became aware of how different the writing sounded from when I write something in Roman letters. Not only did writing characterssound very different from the way writing letters sounds, the two types of script have a very different kinetic feel to them.
