A huge bulk of the words in Chinese are compound words, consisting of two or more characters put together. Even if you\u2019re already aware of the fact that Chinese characters tend to have their own individual meanings, it\u2019s easy to fall into the trap of not properly taking this fact into account when learning compound words.<\/p>\n
This risk is present even when learning words in Chinese that make up some of the fundamental building blocks of the Chinese language that tend to be learned at the very start. Take the word \u201c<\/strong>\u7684\u65f6\u5019<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> (de sh\u00edh\u00f2u) <\/strong>meaning \u201cwhen\u201d for example. Native English speakers are accustomed to having individual words with distinct meanings as opposed to a word like \u201cwhen\u201d actually consisting of separate characters that tend to have their own meanings and\/or connotations attached to them. After all, you can\u2019t break the English word \u201cwhen\u201d down any further; you can\u2019t derive any smaller meanings from within it. All you have left are the letters, which have no meanings on their own.<\/p>\n As a result, there can be a tendency towards only learning the block of characters that make up the compound words as the meaning they have when they all fit together and ignoring or forgetting how those individual characters contribute<\/em> to the meaning. Because a native English speaker is so accustomed to \u201cwhen\u201d being a word that can\u2019t be broken down, they might not think too hard about how the word can be broken down in Chinese. You might only note on a somewhat subconscious level that the character \u201c<\/strong>\u65f6<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> (sh\u00ed) with the connotations of \u201ctime\u201d is contained within the word for \u201cwhen\u201d, accept that this makes sense and move on. However, a more conscious acknowledgement and investigation of the role that each character plays is extremely helpful for not only making compound words much easier to learn, but also for getting more of an intuitive feel for how the Chinese language works<\/em> and how it\u2019s different from English. Let\u2019s also consider the role that the possessive \u201c<\/strong>\u7684<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> is playing in this situation.<\/p>\n If we loosely and somewhat inaccurately equate the meaning of the possessive \u201c<\/strong>\u7684<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> to the possessive \u201cs\u201d in English \u201c(\u2018s)\u201d as it exists in a phrase such as \u201cMr Gao\u2019s<\/strong> wallet\u201d:<\/p>\n Then we might begin to see what \u7684 is actually doing<\/em> in a phrase that uses \u7684\u65f6\u5019 such as \u201cWhen I was young\u201d:<\/p>\n You might notice that this sentence can be approximated to something like \u201cThe time I was young\u201d or \u201cI was young\u2019s<\/u><\/strong> time<\/u>\u201d \u2013 so \u201c<\/strong>\u7684\u65f6\u5019<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> isn’t just “when”, it’s “-‘s<\/strong> time” or “at the time of”, since it is a combination of the possessive \u7684 and the word for \u201ctime\u201d, \u201c<\/strong>\u65f6\u5019<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong>(sh\u00edh\u00f2u). Even though realisations like these might seem obvious, it\u2019s easy for them to slip right under your nose during your learning, because they are so abundant and apply to so many words other than \u201c<\/strong>\u7684\u65f6\u5019<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong>. Some are much easier to notice than others, and they\u2019re everywhere. Even in the first example sentence we have \u201c<\/strong>\u94b1\u5305<\/strong>\u201d<\/strong> (qi\u00e1nb\u0101o), meaning \u201cpurse\u201d or \u201cwallet\u201d, but it\u2019s just the combination of the two characters meaning \u201cmoney\u201d and \u201cbag\u201d. We could even keep breaking the sentence down even further if we wanted to.<\/p>\n Avoid \u201cLearning to Spell Chinese Words\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n If you are learning a new Chinese word made up of more than one character, and you have never learned or come across at least one of those characters before, find out the meaning\/connotation of the individual character for any characters you don\u2019t know<\/em>. Otherwise, you will be learning a compound character but won\u2019t be able to understand some of those characters when used on their own or in conjunction with other characters to make up different words. This makes the learning process much more efficient; for a two-character compound word, you\u2019ll not only learn what both characters mean when put together but also what they mean on their own. Depending on the word, you could be learning three words for the price of one if you do this, and it will boost your ability to understand what other words with those characters in it mean. It also makes it much easier to learn and remember<\/em> the compound words you do this with. Some compound words are made up of characters that make the meaning of the word really obvious<\/em>, others not so much. But even if the characters don\u2019t seem to instantly indicate what the word means when put together, knowing the connotations of the individual characters can help you remember the word even better. Instead of struggling to remember the word for faucet, your memory might go, \u201cOh! You mean water-dragon-head?\u201d, and if you can remember the characters for each of those words, you\u2019ve just remembered the word for \u201cfaucet\u201d!<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t do this, you are stuck learning to spell<\/em> Chinese words, which is not how the Chinese language is supposed to work. In English you need to learn how to spell words; the individual letters don\u2019t have any meaning, it\u2019s the order of how you put them together that counts. If a certain character in a compound Chinese word doesn\u2019t mean anything to you on its own, it just becomes like a really complicated, fancy letter that you need to remember how to write for the compound word, which makes the learning process unnecessarily difficult. If you only learn that character\u2019s meaning much later, you run the risk of it acting as an entirely separate learning experience and forgetting to tie it back into your inherent understanding of the compound words with it that you\u2019ve already learned.<\/p>\n If you ever catch yourself doing this, make sure to find out what those individual characters mean. Don\u2019t always accept a Chinese compound word at face value; if it isn\u2019t clear to you, try and ask why<\/em> that compound word has the meaning it does.<\/p>\n Examples<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n There are a couple of different categories that Chinese compound words can be sorted into in terms of the role that the individual characters play to look out for!<\/p>\n Words for which the meanings of the individual characters make the meaning of the word very clear:<\/p>\n Words for which the characters might not make the actual word\u2019s meaning immediately obvious, but can make perfect sense in the context of the word:<\/p>\n Some words are borrowed from English and are approximations of the pronunciation in English, therefore the individual characters don\u2019t necessarily contribute to the meaning of the word:<\/p>\n Some other categories may include:<\/p>\n A huge bulk of the words in Chinese are compound words, consisting of two or more characters put together. Even if you\u2019re already aware of the fact that Chinese characters tend to have their own individual meanings, it\u2019s easy to fall into the trap of not properly taking this fact into account when learning compound…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":9651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[179,1],"tags":[77,78,80,89,84],"post_series":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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