Hi all,
I joined Skritter with a view to try and help answer Chinese language questions, and I was thinking of doing a series of posts if people were interested with regard to advanced historical etymology, and also some of the mnemonics I used when I was learning Chinese based on a more historical context.
Would anyone be interested in this?
H
Yes, Iâd be interestedâŚand Iâd be also interested in seeing how native speakers learn Chinese at school which may be different from how foreigners study it.
Hi @fabiothebest,
I only lived in Hong Kong until I was 6, but from what I remember from those days, it was simply learning by rote, which I donât think is conducive for a deeper understand of the culture and language.
Let me give you an example, the word for autumn, ç§, is made up of 猞 and çŤ. If you literally think about this, itâs wheat and fire. Why? My reasoning is that in an agricultural society, which formed most of China, you have to burn the wheat chaff in autumn, right? So the season of putting wheat chaff with fire is autumn. But as a child, you donât really get taught so deeply.
To be honest, even my advanced Mandarin teacher doesnât really delve into the whole etymology of words - thatâs just me being super geeky lol.
Now that Iâve explained a bit more, is this something you might be interested in?
H
I like the Outlier Linguistics Dictionary for the depth of research and references they provide for their historical analysis of the characters. My personal experience is that a lot of less-than-accurate sources get brought up as the âreasonâ behind character history, but Outlier has been quite good at doing their own research at a deeper level to really bring out information. If you havenât taken a look at it, a link is available at: https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/.
An example citation for ç§ is:
ç§ is composed of 猞 âgrainâ and çŤ âfire,â which indicate the original meaning âfall; autumn.â Fields were sometimes burned to rid them of pests like crickets. In fact, early versions of this character were depictions of crickets and crickets being burned. The connection between grain and autumn is quite obvious.
Yes, Iâd be interested.
@Apomixis I love the Outlier Dictionary. And definitely theyâre right in that the very early pictograms show what does look like insects within the character. I believe the one of the older forms of ç§ was written as éž, which certainly lends credence to the idea that insects were involved with the notion of autumn.
But what I tend to do is make the link shorter and more relevant in my head (for example, since the modern character does not involve insects, I make it relevent to just the 猞 and the çŤ component of the character, if that makes sense) so as to help me quickly come up with the character I need. I still try to follow the rules of the ĺ ć¸ though in terms of character formations for my own mnemonics, so at least thereâs some semblance of logic.
The thing Iâm trying to work out at the moment is what kind of lists would you like to follow in terms of orders of characters? Or would you like to leave that to my discretion?
@ZhengHaohua Iâm studying radicals and there is a character that Iâm struggling a bit to memorize. Itâs éŁ. I canât find any clear element in the morphology of the character that helps me to remember the meaning: food, eat. Well, I might recognize it, but I need more memory because I also want to write it. I need a way to remember. Would you know how to make me remember it?
@fabiothebest Heya. Sorry about the delay. Just saw your question. If I were to go through the etymological route, Iâm afraid it wonât help you for éŁ because the character has just moved on so far from the original root. The original bit under the ârenâ at the top used to be ç, which in ancient script was stylised as someone eating, and doesnât look too far from it as well. Although the meaning of ç is different to what čŻ means, you can clearly see how, visually, ç has turned to čŻ under that top ârenâ in éŁ.
Without using the etymological root with this character, itâs one of those that you may have to learn by rote. Certainly this is one of the more basic characters that you learn as a child, so you are taught it by rote.
Itâs a bit difficult to answer this though without knowledge of how many characters you know. But will give a couple of suggestions.
If you know the character čŻ (liang, second tone - means good), then if you add a ârenâ on top of liang, think of it as what do you put inside a person thatâs good⌠food⌠and what do you do with food? Eat it. So ârenâ on top of čŻ is âto eatâ.
Or how about the character ĺž? This is a very popular character which I think is usually found in the early lists for students. Put a dot on top and a ren above the right side of the radical and you end up with éŁ. I guess one way you might be able to remember the link from ĺž to éŁ is that the ă radical is often also known as the éäşşć, meaning, literaly, double person side". That could give you some hint as to linking the ăto convert it to the ârenâ on top of éŁ.
These are just two ways I can think of right now as Iâm still at work, but they will require links to other characters. Let me know if youâre still struggling with those suggestions and Iâll see if I can think of something else.
H
Thanks a lot for your answer. I can tell you that Iâm studying for HSK3-4. I didnât know čŻ but ĺž is one of the first characters we learn. I didnât notice that I can find a part of that in the character éŁ. I didnât learn how to write ĺž yet though 
. I can recognize practically all the words I studied and speak for having a general conversation but writing is something I didnât practise enough and now I want to get better at it, so Iâm writing with pen and paper and also subscribed to Skritter. As you said I may have to learn it by roteâŚanyway your comment was useful and although Iâm not sure Iâll remember ç unless I write it many times, thanks to that I can see the connection with food and eating. Thank you 
@fabiothebest Sorry if it wasnât the kind of answer youâre looking for. Hope it helped a bit anyway.
Thatâs really good youâre upping it a notch with reading and writing. There are unfortunately words with have moved so far from their original root that itâs just necessary to learn by rote. Just lucky we still have characters like éž which still looks like⌠a tortoise haha. Will definitely say stroke order is important though, so donât skimp on learning those and getting them right!
I think physically writing is still important though because nowadays when typing all you do is type pinyin, and itâs easy to lose the writing of all youâre doing is typing pinyin. This is why I still sometimes opt for ćĺŻŤčź¸ĺ Ľćł on my phone, and also writing physical letters too, although I usually get my brushes out for that as I canât resist a good letter written with proper brush and ink!