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Thread: 2000-3000 characters and I can read chinese????
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Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )
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[quote=GUEST12220,249706]Knowing a certain amount of characters does not imply knowing how to read chinese. Although it is true that the root of chinese characters were at once associated to various physical objects and drawn accordingly to represent them, characters in the modern sense are now mostly phonetic in nature which have evolved over many centuries. Therefore knowing the meaning of a character does not necessarily mean you can extract the meaning of the word it is trying to communicate. Most modern chinese words are formed using two or more characters in which each character phonetically representing the sound of the word. for exambe the word "mashang" means "immediately" the "ma" character used means "horse", the "shang" character means "on". On careful review it seems logical to think that "horse on" would mean "immediately" however without knowing the prior bit of information one who simply knows the individual meaning of the character would have most probably misinterpreted the true meaning of "horse on". eg, Wo yao mashang qu. literal translation is "I want horse on go". Without knowing that mashang=immediately (in the modern sense), the reader could have been led to understand, "I want to go by horse" instead of "I want to immediately go" and missed the intended meaning altogether. Therefore knowing a fixed amount of character will NOT enable you to READ chinese. In order to read chinese you need to know the individual meaning but more importantly you need to know the meaning of the combinations.. this is the key to reading chinese. So to quote the great John DeFrancis, one should ask "how many combinations of characters do you know rather than how many individual character you know" Cheers![/quote]
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