Still, once you have learned around one-quarter of these radicals, you might want to continue learning the remainder simultaneously with the characters in the step below.
It often helps to look at the traditional version to see the origins of a character. Suppose you find the origins of characters fascinating.
In that case, I really recommend taking a look at the Fun with Chinese Character book series that breaks down characters, often considering Chinese culture and going back to the bone oracle where possible.
These are the most enjoyable characters to learn, as there is often interesting and sometimes entertaining logic behind their creation. This is also the most natural progression of study and learning some of the more advanced radicals. You can learn more about pictographs, combined ideographs, and the other types of Chinese characters here.
As I mentioned in the five steps at the beginning of my post, a Chinese character also tells us how to pronounce the character, which is an essential part of learning to read. The only difference is a slight change from the second tone to the fourth tone learn more about tones here. There are several methods below that you can try to make reading and remembering characters a little easier! This reminds me of a game I used to play when I was teaching English, which involves the student rolling several dice with tiny pictures on each face instead of numbers.
The student then has to create a story based on these pictures. Participants were then handed the first set of three randomly ordered pictures in a stack, face-down. Participants flipped them over at the same time and arranged them in a sequential order.
Each subsequent set of pictures was presented separately and was analyzed individually. After the participant had completed each set, the experimenter coded the spatial arrangement. After completion of the five sets, participants were asked to explain why they thought they had arranged the cards as they had, in a brief post-experiment interview.
Including instruction, the experiment took 5 min on average. We predicted that English-speaking participants should tend to arrange pictures LR, following the direction of their writing system, that Mainland Chinese participants should do the same, and that Taiwanese participants should show a stronger tendency to arrange pictures TB, in accordance with the predominance of this direction in their writing and reading experience.
The arrangements were straightforward to score and no data were missing. Examples of each are in Figure 2. Directions are defined from the perspective of the participant, so TB actually involved arranging the three cards with the temporally earliest one farthest away from the participant along the mid-sagittal axis, and BT placed the temporally earliest card closest to the participant along the same axis.
All but three participants used exactly the same orientation for each of the five sets of pictures s he ordered. As seen in Table 1 , below, the English speakers only used the LR arrangement pattern. Participants from Mainland China displayed a strong tendency to adopt the same LR arrangement pattern, though a few also used a TB orientation. For the Taiwanese participants, all five patterns were observed, with the largest numbers being the LR and TB orientations. The critical expected differences were for English and Chinese participants to have proportionally more responses in the LR pattern than Taiwanese participants, who are anticipated to have relatively more TB.
There were also RL responses in the Taiwanese data but none produced by the other groups. As predicted, English and Chinese participants have different preferences for arranging sequential information than the Taiwanese participants do. English-speaking participants, as expected, arranged pictures LR.
For the most part, so did Chinese participants. For both, their spatial depictions of time were consistent with the dominant LR pattern present in their writing and reading experience. But there was a bit more variability among the Chinese participants than the English speaking ones. Five participants used a TB arrangement pattern. One explanation for these results is continuing cultural presence of the TB writing system in old texts that predate the shift to LR in the s, or on other artifacts, like calligraphy and signage on government buildings.
The results from the Taiwanese participants were more variable still. Responses in the post-test interview may help us understand the broad range of responses the experiment elicited.
We asked each participant why s he arranged the pictures in the particular pattern we observed. For LR and TB patterns, the answers were predictable. Participants, when asked to reflect on their behavior, reported arranging these pictures mainly based on their reading and writing habits.
And as all participants were residing in the United States at the time of data collection, it is possible that the Chinese and Taiwanese speakers were more likely to use LR due to exposure to English writing. However, when we did a median split of Chinese and Taiwanese participants based on the length of time they had been residing in the United States, we found no significant difference between the two halves.
The RL result may relate to the secondary direction of standard writing in Taiwan; while it is primarily written from TB, each column is placed to the left of the preceding one. Other response types BT and CW, for example , elicited responses not specific to writing. Some BT participants explained that growing things go from BT, while some CW participants evoked the cyclicity of growth and reproduction.
Aside from writing direction, there are also a few linguistic features that distinguish the Standard Mandarin spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan, including lexical differences, and some of these might in principle be responsible for the difference in behavior we found. We cannot conclusively rule out all differences as potential factors, but we can look at the most relevant possible difference, which would be metaphorical language for time. If Taiwanese speakers use a preponderance of vertical language for time, while Mainland Chinese speakers use relatively little vertical metaphorical time language, then this possible confound could explain the Taiwanese tendency to represent time TB.
However, corpus research shows that in fact Taiwanese speakers use relatively little vertical time language, about half as much as horizontal metaphorical time language Chen, , which matches or may even be less frequent than vertical time language in Mainland China Rong, So differences in how time is construed metaphorically are unlikely to account for the difference in responses we observed; they would in fact predict the opposite effect if anything.
However, the existence of vertical time language in both dialects might help to explain why a small portion of Chinese participants placed the earliest picture at the top and the latest at the bottom, while no English participants did so.
The direction of a writing system affects production of sequential arrangements. For English participants, the exceptionless LR pattern demonstrates that spatial representations for sequences take left as the beginning, proceeding toward the right, while this tendency is slightly less strong among Mainland Chinese participants.
On the assumption that there are no innate biological differences distinguishing the populations with respect to their preferred spatializations of time, there must be differences in the experiences members of these different populations have that lead to the differences in behavior. These other factors may include differences in cultural values and practices.
Since Mainland China and Taiwan share the same language, many core cultural values, traditions, and much of their history, if it were any of these cultural factors other than writing direction that were causing differences between English and Taiwanese participants, Chinese participants should pattern with Taiwanese participants.
Yet, as we have seen, the behavior of the Chinese participants is closely aligned with that of the English participants and different from that of the Taiwanese participants. Despite the similarity of Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese culture, it might still be that other cultural factors, and not just writing system orientation, are responsible for the effects reported above. In order to further understand exactly what the causes of these cross-linguistic differences are, the same experiments might be conducted with prelinguistic children or illiterate adults, who would have less experience with writing systems, and thus would be less influenced by them.
If it is truly writing orientation that is the major factor in the results described above, then the effect of native language should disappear with such participants. Another way to pursue this line of research further would be to experimentally introduce experience with a new writing system to participants drawn from a single population, to see whether — over time — such a manipulation could affect their spatial representation of time. It is also possible that writing direction has effects on other cognitive operations than the representation of time.
Space is used as a basis for a variety of abstract concepts, like power, morality, happiness, and so on Lakoff and Johnson, Finally, it is worth noting that the method we used did not distinguish between the representation of sequence and the representation of time per se. It is possible that the effect we observed was the result of spatializations of sequence and not time — in that case, we might expect to find similar effects with arranging atemporal sequences, like colors, for example.
The current design leaves open the question of which of these facilities we are tapping into. To conclude, these results support the hypothesis that writing system orientation influences spatial cognition. We have seen that the location where a writing system starts is where people spatially represent the beginnings of temporal sequences. These differences in behavior may in turn influence how we interpret the world and language about it. More broadly, it seems that writing system orientation is an idiosyncratic linguistic characteristic that can have an impact on our cognitive system in general, like other linguistic features that have relativistic effects.
The details of a language — in this case an apparently superficial feature of how people in a given culture interact with its written form, seems to shape the way that people think about something totally unrelated. Learning to use a writing system creates routines of interaction with space that affect how we map time onto it. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Boroditsky, L. Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75, 1— Does language shape thought? The Reader will not only read your chosen characters for you but also transcribe them into pinyin, translate them and show their related meanings.
Another useful feature is a character lookup, as well as making your own list of characters based on your web history. It also works offline. This Chinese reading tool helps with understanding any Mandarin text in a number of ways: it shows an English translation, pinyin and an accurate segmentation of sentences into words. There are many resources for flashcards online, but, of course, you can just simply make your own.
Learning a language with the help of literature is always a great idea. Not only do you have different options, but you can also find many resources for your specific learning level and also have fun while studying. Try each tool to see which one helps you learn the most. Only then you can be the true master of Mandarin Chinese. Veronika is a freelance writer. Languages are her main topic and passion. THIS is how I learn a language in 3 months.
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