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Understanding Chinese Characters - Introductory lecture. 才 phonetic series explained.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 พ.ย. 2013
- My book about Chinese characters: www.foreverast...
Website: www.foreverastu...
First lecture in the hopefully longer series on Chinese character etymology and Chinese character phonetic series. In this lecture I try to explain what phono-semantic compound characters are (形聲字), explain the 才 phonetic series and etymology of all characters in it.
Characters in this video:
才 cai2 - talent, material. Leading phonetic character of the group.
財 cai2 - money, wealth
材 cai2 - material
在 zai4 - to be located at
載 zai4 - to give someone a ride
裁 cai2 - to cut
戴 dai4 - to wear (clothes), to put on
If you find these videos useful, feel free to like, comment or subscribe.
I'm such a linguistics nerd and started learning mandarin (simplified) last month so this series is so valuable to me.
Thanks so much again!
Thank you very much.
This is great. This is definitely the understanding I need to learn the characters.
Your videos are what got me interested in etymology! Well made video :)
Ann
This is fantastic! I've been searching for etymological explanations of Chinese characters for a long time. The details really help me understand thoroughly and read more easily. Loved the bit about the mask, hands and feet meaning "difference." So fun! 🤓
I greatly appreciate your "pure" approach to the explanation of meaning and phonetic components . I've learnt Hanzi via Heisig which is to me both enjoyable and efficient - but the phonetic is unapologetically missing and of course the underpinning tales are purely artificial . Your explanation is both definitive and historically "real" - many thanks.
Hello Graham. I'm glad that you liked the video. When I was first learning Characters, similarly to Heisig, I also formed simple associations between character components, their sounds and tones through visual mnemonics, but I soon became totally overwhelmed by them and later dropped character learning altogether. Maybe learning characters through these 'raw/pure' explanations would have been much more fun and productive. Unfortunately there were no materials to learn from, I had to learn characters the hard way and later create some materials myself. I'm sorry for the late reply, but I just realized today, that I wasn't getting any youtube comment notifications. It also took me a while to figure out how to comment on videos in the new youtube setup. All the best.
Hi, Graham.
You will find the phonetic components for all the Heisig characters in the appendices to his books. I know because I use this method and have found it quite helpful.
Thanks for this video.
The way that you presented the lecture is amazing.
The key thing is that your explanation is so clear and logical that it's easy to understand. And thus easy to remember.
I've found learning Chinese characters extremely difficult.
As you break it down...I just get it...and it sticks.
Also...each character learned is a key to unlocking other words.
I appreciate the time and effort you've put into understanding the characters deeply as well as explaining them logically.
It makes learning Chinese characters engaging
+Theo Joubert Thank you very much for the nice words. I will try to make more videos like this.
I deeply agree with all you said
Thanks. You're very clear and it is exciting to have the logic of characters presented. As an intermediate chinese learner, I can sense a logic but I don't have enough experience or knowledge to make the connections. Your generous work is a fantastic resource.
Thank you for the nice comment. I'm glad you like the videos.
Very enlightening! An eye-opener..! Thank you so much...
+Valerie Graves Hello. I'm glad you like the video.
Two questions:
1. If the first two characters are both pronounced "cái", then how can one distinguish them in speech where one cannot see the character?
2. Is there a font somewhere with these ancient styles of writing? (like the seal script or the bone script, for example)
1. You can't. You either have to see the character or hear the multi-syllabic word or sentence in which the character appears. It's not the only example. Chinese has only a few hundred syllables and has a very large number of homophones. The 'shi' syllable only has about 200 meanings.
2. Yes. There are at least two Seal script fonts and one Oracle bone script font that I've seen and used.
1. I know. That's why I was asking how do they distinguish them in speech, when they cannot see the character.
2. Care to reveal their names or where I can download them?
For question 1, you know through the context. When you hear qiancai which means wealth, you can tell it's the first Cai. When you hear mucai which means log, you know it's the second Cai.
@Winston Grettum Oh. So these characters alone aren't "words" yet? That changes a lot.
@@bonbonponythey are both 'words'. Chinese characters are pretty much words by themselves, but also can be compounded to form larger 'words'. Furthermore, Characters are made up of components that are often other characters. It just fractals
Thank you! Very interesting!
Wonderful lecture! :) Only one note: maybe you could move a little more quickly through the explanations. I think most of us could still keep up, and you could cover more material. Thanks for taking the time to make this and share with the rest of us. 谢谢！
Hello Michael. I'm glad you found the video useful. Do you think I went too slow in this video only, or in other ones as well? Since this was the introductory video to the whole series, I wanted to explain things more in detail. The rest of the videos in are much more straightforward (hopefully:).
Very helpful, but try text boxes instead of scribble. Good thing I can hear and listen. Joking aside, this was great.
What a fabulous video. I really look forward to watching more of them.
BTW, moxibustion, also means the use of heat ( usually using mugwort) to treat acupuncture points. This is an ancient therapeutic practice in China. I use it in my own medical practice. I never knew it was used as you mention it in your video referring to the oracle bones. What is your source for this definition?
I'm glad you found the video helpful.
Turns out that the correct term is Pyromantic divination and fortune telling:) Moxibustion is exactly what you say. I don't know where I have this term from but I don't remember reading anything about moxibustion as a therapeutic practice and I couln't have invented this expression myself, so I guess I read it in a source related to the Oracle bone script.
but 田 within the character of 戴 is field, not mask, no?
Also do you know of any websites that tell you the character's phono-semantic particle? Most dictionaries just give you the radical.
Ps I love this lecture - thank you =)
Hello Ricola. I'm glad you enjoy the lectures. I haven't found any websites that explain characters this way, that's why I started doing these videos :) There are many etymological paper dictionaries that cover phonetic elements, but as far as I know there are no websites or online dictionaries that do this.
田 tian2 only happens to resemble the top part of 異 in 戴. It used to be a picture of a mask in earlier versions of the character and when the Seal script was created 田 was chosen to replace that mask because its shape resembled the it, but it has nothing to do with the meaning field. This is a very very frequent feature in Chinese characters. During the transition into the Seal script elements were often chosen only because it was easy to simplify and format the older structure into the newly created Seal script character that way.
For instance:
耑 - the top used to be 生 the bottom a picture of plants roots, simplified down to 山 shan1 'mountain' at the top and 而 er2 'beard' at the bottom both of which have nothing to do with the meaning of the character.
循 - In one of the original Oracle bone character version a shield with two buckles for holding it, with an object going through them was clearly visible. The shield with the buckles came to be rewritten as 目, with the object alternated and moved to the top. Nothing to do with 目 mu4 - eye. According to Karlgren, the left part symbolizes the covering, shielding idea.
敢 - The left side was a picture of a bear, nothing to do with 耳 ěr 'ear'. The right side is 攵(攴 pū) 'beat'. To dare to beat a bear? - Wenlin
ect.
the closest you can get would be: www.archchinese.com/chinese_english_dictionary.html
you can either enter the search word as pinyin cai2 or simplified Chinese (entry in traditional Chinese will not give picto-phonetic component breakdown eg try 財 vs 财 )
it's also not as detailed nor as historically accurate as here, of course, eg the last 3 words in this series, the reduced 才 is interpreted as a '+' (ten)
hope this helps some...
...great series, looking forward for more
+MRKLjinjang Please consult the dictionary: 木 mu4 'tree' 樹 shu4 'tree'
+Understanding Chinese Characters
Further reading:
木
ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char=%E6%9C%A8
樹
ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char=%E6%A8%B9
good video, I hope it may help my students. I also got it on my web site.
I'm glad you found the video useful. I'll try to make more. All the best.
Please, make more. IF YOU SPEAK ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF THE RADICALS, THAT WILL BE COOL
nomadicworld I think that maybe to talk about the origin of each radical thoroughly would be very time consuming. If you look at this video, it took me 5 minutes to talk about the origin of 才 and there are 6 characters in this video so that would be another 30 minutes. Maybe I'll simplify the explanations, but I don't know.. seems like it will take too much time. Sorry :(
Great video, knowledgable and resourceful; What app you used for presenting this wonderful video, do you use ShowMe or Explain Everything? thanks for sharing.
Hello. I'm happy you like the video. I use Smoothdraw and Camtasia :)
to give a ride to be somewhere
zai zai
to give a ride to a material person to be somewhere
zai cai ren zai
No, not moxibustion. That's burning "moxa," little bits of supposed medicine on the skin.
"Pyromancy" might be one possibility.
...but your characters series is really fine, so congrats and thank you!
-dlj.
Hello and thank you. It was already mentioned in the comments. I'm glad you like the videos.
Where did you learn this?
Years of my own research.
Useful. But too moo much circumvoluting.
Thanks. I'll try to work on that.
Thanks for the video. But I think if you wrote a script and read it this video would be 8 minutes instead of 21 minutes. If you take out all your thinking time and ums and ahs, and long pauses.
Videos will have a lot more views if they are quickly to the point.
Well, for me the uhms and ahms give the time to process what he's saying... a 8min cut to the point video might overwhelm some that actually want to understand the concept of phono-senantic compounds...
Like me, for example
think you have done a good job and very interesting BUT, you fail to mention this is for TRADITIONAL Chinese characters, an important difference. I guess you are either in HK or Taiwan, but for mainland China......well, what a shame!
+Colin Scorgie Hello. I think it's this video only where I don't give simplified examples. I do mention throughout my channel the traditional and simplified character differences extensively.
士 土 😂
ummm...arhhhh... ummm.....arrreeee...... ahhh... 👎