I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month

Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by nneonneo on Thursday May 14, 2020 @05:02PM (#23185406)

The radical (which is usually on the left, or bottom) is sometimes semantically meaningful. In your example, 汁 has the water radical, and it is indeed a liquid. The rest of the character aside from the radical is usually entirely meaningless, aside from possibly providing the pronunciation.

As an example: 果裹猓粿蜾 are all pronounced identically - guǒ - but mean “fruit, package, monkey, rice cake, wasp” respectively. The radicals are more useful: in the last three, you have the “animal” radical (monkey), one of the “food” radicals (rice cake), and the “bug” radical (wasp).

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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by saagarjha on Thursday May 14, 2020 @05:42PM (#23185896)

How do you tell them apart in speech? Just context?

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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by telotortium on Thursday May 14, 2020 @06:10PM (#23186184)

Usually they will form compounds with other characters, and the compounds will be unambiguous. For the first two characters, you have stuff like 水果、苹果（"fruit", "apple" respectively); 包裹 for "package". 裹 is also a verb by itself meaning "wrap":

> 我把身子用毯子裹上。

> Wǒ bǎ shēnzi yòng tǎnzi guǒshàng.

> I wrapped myself up in a blanket.

This last example shows that just like in English, words that are pronounced the same in Chinese can be distinguished by part-of-speech. You'd rarely confuse "red" the color and "read" (past tense), even though they're pronounced the same, because the first is an adjective and the second a verb (except in the old pun "What's black and white and read all over?", where you think "read" is actually "red" due to the grammatical structure of the sentence).

This is a pretty good explanation of how Chinese characters work, explained via English words: https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

(The other three "guǒ" characters are quite rare, so may be literary-only.)

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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by core-e on Thursday May 14, 2020 @06:41PM (#23186469)

> What's black and white and read all over?"

This is a riddle not a pun.

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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by kelnos on Thursday May 14, 2020 @11:17PM (#23188484)

It is a riddle that uses a pun as a critical component to throw the person answering off the trail.

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Re:I learned 1500 Chinese Characters in a Month by kristianov on Thursday May 14, 2020 @11:09PM (#23188444)

For sizzle.

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