Last time we explored the first two parts of Chinese language:
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Chinese language is not Alphabetical.
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Learning Chinese language is a Bilingual process.
3. Chinese language Competence involves character confusion at every level.
A common learning phenomenon with a command of Chinese characters is that one will regularly encounter unfamiliar characters. For example, you are in a museum and you are looking at an archaic weapon like a halberd. If you didn’t know what the item is called, you read it and you feel you can now pronounce it. You have built your vocabulary and you feel in command of your language.
Chinese money in its original weapon shape as displayed in Qingdao Municipal Museum.
If you saw the unfamiliar word without the item, you can generally pronounce it and ask someone else verbally for its meaning in practice, or look it up in a dictionary by typing/reproducing it. One can sound an unfamiliar vocabulary out, without knowing its meaning. Furthermore, with Greek and Latin traditions, many unfamiliar words give a clue to its part of speech and grammatical function, so there is some way to guess, even if it stands alone and removed from context. Say, “to transmogrify” is most likely a verb, not a preposition or noun.
However, for Chinese, it’s far likely that the new vocabulary is silent, unpronounceable. The character may indicate its meaning through its parts and using that as a clue, the new vocabulary is related to a foot action, a hand action, a tree or vegetation of some sort, a bird or fish of some sort, or weapon related. Think kingdom and phylum in biological terms. Words like feline and bovine tell us what type of mammal, and the -ine ending tells us it is likely an adjective.
But even that is not accurate as the character’s trajectory in development over hundreds of years if not thousands may have nothing to do with its current function. (A comparable example is the English word salary, related to salt, as its Latin root indicates that being paid in salt was a common practice.) For example, the character for money (钱 qían) has a weapon radical. Another high likelihood is that the new character looks dangerously close to another character already in common use such as a corral or stable for livestock (栈zhàn).
Here is a museum exhibit in Qingdao, China showing the connection between Chinese coins in the circular shape and its older weapon shape presumably from the Bronze Age.
In this example, 钱 qían and 栈zhàn may look alike, they share little in sound nor meaning.
Now, you have character confusion. This happens to all levels of competency, whether you are a learner with 50 characters under your belt or 5,000. The part of speech isn’t as clearly revealed since that is fluid in Chinese indicated by syntax, word order. Depending on its position, a character can be noun or verb form, like contract an illness or sign a contract.
