[關於康熙部首01] Why Learn the Kangxi Radicals?
16 March 2014 [link youtube]
Your textbooks have probably told you two things about the Kangxi Radicals: (1) you absolutely must study this system if you're ever going to make progress with the written language, and (2) don't worry, nobody actually does it, so forgive yourself now for your inevitable failure, and just muddle along in ignorance.
This is a mixed message that reflects the mixed emotions the Chinese often have toward the "roots" and etymologies of their written language: your teachers will simultanously tell you that this stuff is crucial to understanding anything at all, yet, also, they will complain that any questions you may have on the subject are just a waste of time.
I have met many foreigners who have become fluent in Chinese without learning the radicals (and etymologies) of the written language, but they look back on this subject wistfully as part of their education that was missing. They tend to think of it as something that still impairs their work in the language (from day to day), and, for at least some people I've met, it genuinely does.
In this first video, I look at a set of examples to rapidly answer the question, "Why Learn the Kangxi Radicals?"
Youtube Automatic Transcription
when you look at this image what do you
see if you're a beginner with Chinese you may just feel that you're looking at yet another depressing reminder of how much you have to memorize there's no phonetic relationship between the four symbols you're seeing here and there's no logical relationship between the appearance of any of the symbols and what they mean or at least not one that you can guess from on a perspective but all four of these examples are in fact the theme to symbols repeated again and again theme one is simple historically this is the radical that's called the spoon radical and we're seeing it here eight times in four different pairs with different orientations so right away we have the riddle of the Chinese system of radicals staring us in the face and you have the exciting prospect that motivates many students that if you just did a little bit of extra work above and beyond what your textbooks tell you you could dig down into the mystery that's left behind by ancient Chinese and that were confronted with day by day in so many symbols that don't make sense and in most cases don't even make sense to our teachers professors and definitely don't make sense to the average fluent speaker the language this is the traditional character still used in Taiwan Hong Kong and in Chinese literature to construct sentences with the meaning that you should do something that you must do something that you need to do something so as you would guess it's one of the most common written characters in the whole language the pictograph on the far left is the easiest to understand if you don't already know Chinese some extent and unbelievably this simple fundamental meaning that you should do something is displayed fichte graphically as a bird sitting next to a man above a heart under a cliff in the pictograph on the left you can actually see the bird the bird is the top right part of the character it still looks like a bird in the pictograph although it devolves into more or less a grid of lions and the other characters and the heart is a sort of three chambered mess toward the bottom of the character but still at that stage of the language you maybe had a shot of guessing what you were looking at so why learn system of radicals well it's a system that elicits great passion amongst Chinese people especially amongst teachers of the language and the passions are quite conflicted people will tell you that the system is ancient it's not ancient the 18th century is just not that many centuries ago but people definitely feel that it's the ancient foundation the language rests on and you could say it's the kind of intermediary between the ancient of the moderns the way that modern people today reach out to try to feel that they're in contact with the ancient meanings hidden within the language all the examples using this video are very very common words none of them are obscure none of them are literary and example you're looking at right now has a meaning similar to category and if you're already advanced in Chinese or if you're fluent in Chinese I'd ask you to remember how difficult it was when you were first learning language to glance at a symbol like this and break it into pieces this is maybe the most fundamental benefit of studying the radicals and it's something that everyone does even if you have no formal training or if you just grow up as a child learning Chinese organically you have to be able to glance at a symbol like this and break it down into smaller pieces so this is the first answer the question why alarm system of radicals to learn to see the glyphs in their component parts to memorize new glyphs through their components Chinese etymology for many people is a frustrating sort of dead-end struggle but you have to ask yourself would you prefer to have no meaning to explain character at all or would you rather do the work and come to the end of that struggle this example I showed you earlier the meaning is similar to category the correct breakdown of the character as it's written today as you can see here very clearly is right dog human head those are the three parts comprising the character if you have a teacher who made up a charming story to explain to you what this character means that's fine maybe you have parents or grandparents who told you some kind of story some kind of fable that makes this easier to memorize you can invent your own story you can say oh it's a man sitting on the porch watching a dog in the rice field but the truth is the real truth is if you study the etymology nobody knows why this character looks the way it does nobody knows how these three components were gathered together to be associated with this meaning of the sound some people will theorize that maybe two of the symbols are phonetic and only one relates to the meaning there are different theories floating around out there none of them are factual they're just speculative and ultimately as a student you're left to wonder so sometimes we know the ancient logic of the glyph although you can't see it in the modern form this is usually because of round after round of simplification and regeneration that has gone on in the Chinese language simplification isn't something that just happened once in the 20th century the construction we call clerical script transformed many of the most common characters and character components and sometimes the logic of what the glyph used to be has been totally forgotten so is the etymology still worth learning here again we're looking at one of the most common characters in the language and you should recognize the similarity drew your attention to this is drawn with the spoon radical you have it there twice so we've seen now five different characters all of which comprise the spoon radical forever mysterious reason in this case though the spoon radical is not a spoon and it's not a human form either contrary to what a teacher may have told you what you may have read in a textbook this glyph already at this point depicts the entire body of a bear and in early examples the bear is actually carrying a separate piece of meat in his mouth in some versions of the character the meat has just become part of the body of the bear but at least some of the time the two spoon radicals actually represent the four legs of the bear the triangle is the bear's head and then you have the piece of meat hanging for the both of the bear does anybody know that today does anybody learn the character that way well you can ask around but most students even if Chinese is your first language you have such a burden of memorization in front of you that people make up all kinds of funny stories to help them get along with the language if you remember this as a spoon spoon triangle moon that would be understandable because the way the modern characters written is indeed two spoons a triangle and then the moon radical a symbol of the moon because the piece of meat has with the passage of centuries degenerated to become identical to the character that represents the moon this is the reason why I was suggesting you might have heard a different funny story about the character it could be that the teacher told you for instance that it doesn't show a bear but it shows ver with no legs on this slide the first two symbols on the Left we see the picture of the bear that I warned you about before and then we see the bear with four lines under it so some people will tell you that that's a bear with four legs but I'm putting this up as a comparison these are the types of false stories that people make up when they don't know the radicals the four lines that you see at the bottom all three of the symbols on the right those all represent fire the fire radical so in fact the two symbols on the left you're comparing a bear to a bear being roasted over a fire the next symbol is a fish I have genuinely heard of teachers telling those students that a fish has four legs because in ancient China people believe that fish walked around on four legs in the bottom of the sea you may have their own crazy stories about how these characters get taught to people how they get memorized and then the next is the color black and in all three of those examples the four lines at the bottom represent fire they do not represent legs although stranger things have happened as you just learned the double spoon radical represents the legs of the bear this is perhaps the single most common character in the Chinese language and if you ask your teacher to explain it to you if you learn the system of radicals try to explain to yourself and study the etymology you will simply come into a dead end this is used in constructing many many sentences to link two halves of a sentence together and if you were to interpret the symbols it would mean white spoon so different symbols for the spoon is a running theme in this this episode this is not the same as the spoon radical it's a different character meaning spoon that's on the right hand side and then you have the character white on the left hand side you will hear different theories trying to explain it saying that perhaps the spoon used to be a phonetic character and I think that's probably true on the whole other people will offer you a theory that no it really did originally mean a spoonful of something that was white and trying to construct the the history of the meaning that way but the truth is we just don't know and even for a character this common learning the radicals is a very limited use although it does at least allow you to split this into two halves and memorize that way finally this is again one of the most common characters and it explains why many teachers are uncomfortable talking about system of radicals even if they encourage their students to do it even if your textbook says you must learn the radicals to get ahead and that's because characters like this have no explanation we don't have an explanation for how this came to be written in two halves as it now is we don't know how it's linked to the more ancient form that you see at the top on the right hand side we don't know what it ever was supposed to symbolize or if it ever had a fanatic value this is just a total mystery and if you break it into components they do not match up with any of the the radicals people will tell you this is one of the human form radicals on the right hand side but you can see just in the information the screen that's not really accurate so the system of radicals if limited it's confusing even people who are native speakers language find it confusing it gives you more information to memorize it's actually more difficult than learning the language the way native speaker does but it makes the language more interesting and more rewarding if you ask yourself the question should I study the system of radicals should I learn the history of this character to the extent that it's knowable should I learn to break this down into its component parts I think the reverse question is what alternative do you have as surreal and strange as it is Birdman heart cliff these are the types of pictographic puzzles that you'll be memorizing in thousands if you're serious about learning written Chinese
see if you're a beginner with Chinese you may just feel that you're looking at yet another depressing reminder of how much you have to memorize there's no phonetic relationship between the four symbols you're seeing here and there's no logical relationship between the appearance of any of the symbols and what they mean or at least not one that you can guess from on a perspective but all four of these examples are in fact the theme to symbols repeated again and again theme one is simple historically this is the radical that's called the spoon radical and we're seeing it here eight times in four different pairs with different orientations so right away we have the riddle of the Chinese system of radicals staring us in the face and you have the exciting prospect that motivates many students that if you just did a little bit of extra work above and beyond what your textbooks tell you you could dig down into the mystery that's left behind by ancient Chinese and that were confronted with day by day in so many symbols that don't make sense and in most cases don't even make sense to our teachers professors and definitely don't make sense to the average fluent speaker the language this is the traditional character still used in Taiwan Hong Kong and in Chinese literature to construct sentences with the meaning that you should do something that you must do something that you need to do something so as you would guess it's one of the most common written characters in the whole language the pictograph on the far left is the easiest to understand if you don't already know Chinese some extent and unbelievably this simple fundamental meaning that you should do something is displayed fichte graphically as a bird sitting next to a man above a heart under a cliff in the pictograph on the left you can actually see the bird the bird is the top right part of the character it still looks like a bird in the pictograph although it devolves into more or less a grid of lions and the other characters and the heart is a sort of three chambered mess toward the bottom of the character but still at that stage of the language you maybe had a shot of guessing what you were looking at so why learn system of radicals well it's a system that elicits great passion amongst Chinese people especially amongst teachers of the language and the passions are quite conflicted people will tell you that the system is ancient it's not ancient the 18th century is just not that many centuries ago but people definitely feel that it's the ancient foundation the language rests on and you could say it's the kind of intermediary between the ancient of the moderns the way that modern people today reach out to try to feel that they're in contact with the ancient meanings hidden within the language all the examples using this video are very very common words none of them are obscure none of them are literary and example you're looking at right now has a meaning similar to category and if you're already advanced in Chinese or if you're fluent in Chinese I'd ask you to remember how difficult it was when you were first learning language to glance at a symbol like this and break it into pieces this is maybe the most fundamental benefit of studying the radicals and it's something that everyone does even if you have no formal training or if you just grow up as a child learning Chinese organically you have to be able to glance at a symbol like this and break it down into smaller pieces so this is the first answer the question why alarm system of radicals to learn to see the glyphs in their component parts to memorize new glyphs through their components Chinese etymology for many people is a frustrating sort of dead-end struggle but you have to ask yourself would you prefer to have no meaning to explain character at all or would you rather do the work and come to the end of that struggle this example I showed you earlier the meaning is similar to category the correct breakdown of the character as it's written today as you can see here very clearly is right dog human head those are the three parts comprising the character if you have a teacher who made up a charming story to explain to you what this character means that's fine maybe you have parents or grandparents who told you some kind of story some kind of fable that makes this easier to memorize you can invent your own story you can say oh it's a man sitting on the porch watching a dog in the rice field but the truth is the real truth is if you study the etymology nobody knows why this character looks the way it does nobody knows how these three components were gathered together to be associated with this meaning of the sound some people will theorize that maybe two of the symbols are phonetic and only one relates to the meaning there are different theories floating around out there none of them are factual they're just speculative and ultimately as a student you're left to wonder so sometimes we know the ancient logic of the glyph although you can't see it in the modern form this is usually because of round after round of simplification and regeneration that has gone on in the Chinese language simplification isn't something that just happened once in the 20th century the construction we call clerical script transformed many of the most common characters and character components and sometimes the logic of what the glyph used to be has been totally forgotten so is the etymology still worth learning here again we're looking at one of the most common characters in the language and you should recognize the similarity drew your attention to this is drawn with the spoon radical you have it there twice so we've seen now five different characters all of which comprise the spoon radical forever mysterious reason in this case though the spoon radical is not a spoon and it's not a human form either contrary to what a teacher may have told you what you may have read in a textbook this glyph already at this point depicts the entire body of a bear and in early examples the bear is actually carrying a separate piece of meat in his mouth in some versions of the character the meat has just become part of the body of the bear but at least some of the time the two spoon radicals actually represent the four legs of the bear the triangle is the bear's head and then you have the piece of meat hanging for the both of the bear does anybody know that today does anybody learn the character that way well you can ask around but most students even if Chinese is your first language you have such a burden of memorization in front of you that people make up all kinds of funny stories to help them get along with the language if you remember this as a spoon spoon triangle moon that would be understandable because the way the modern characters written is indeed two spoons a triangle and then the moon radical a symbol of the moon because the piece of meat has with the passage of centuries degenerated to become identical to the character that represents the moon this is the reason why I was suggesting you might have heard a different funny story about the character it could be that the teacher told you for instance that it doesn't show a bear but it shows ver with no legs on this slide the first two symbols on the Left we see the picture of the bear that I warned you about before and then we see the bear with four lines under it so some people will tell you that that's a bear with four legs but I'm putting this up as a comparison these are the types of false stories that people make up when they don't know the radicals the four lines that you see at the bottom all three of the symbols on the right those all represent fire the fire radical so in fact the two symbols on the left you're comparing a bear to a bear being roasted over a fire the next symbol is a fish I have genuinely heard of teachers telling those students that a fish has four legs because in ancient China people believe that fish walked around on four legs in the bottom of the sea you may have their own crazy stories about how these characters get taught to people how they get memorized and then the next is the color black and in all three of those examples the four lines at the bottom represent fire they do not represent legs although stranger things have happened as you just learned the double spoon radical represents the legs of the bear this is perhaps the single most common character in the Chinese language and if you ask your teacher to explain it to you if you learn the system of radicals try to explain to yourself and study the etymology you will simply come into a dead end this is used in constructing many many sentences to link two halves of a sentence together and if you were to interpret the symbols it would mean white spoon so different symbols for the spoon is a running theme in this this episode this is not the same as the spoon radical it's a different character meaning spoon that's on the right hand side and then you have the character white on the left hand side you will hear different theories trying to explain it saying that perhaps the spoon used to be a phonetic character and I think that's probably true on the whole other people will offer you a theory that no it really did originally mean a spoonful of something that was white and trying to construct the the history of the meaning that way but the truth is we just don't know and even for a character this common learning the radicals is a very limited use although it does at least allow you to split this into two halves and memorize that way finally this is again one of the most common characters and it explains why many teachers are uncomfortable talking about system of radicals even if they encourage their students to do it even if your textbook says you must learn the radicals to get ahead and that's because characters like this have no explanation we don't have an explanation for how this came to be written in two halves as it now is we don't know how it's linked to the more ancient form that you see at the top on the right hand side we don't know what it ever was supposed to symbolize or if it ever had a fanatic value this is just a total mystery and if you break it into components they do not match up with any of the the radicals people will tell you this is one of the human form radicals on the right hand side but you can see just in the information the screen that's not really accurate so the system of radicals if limited it's confusing even people who are native speakers language find it confusing it gives you more information to memorize it's actually more difficult than learning the language the way native speaker does but it makes the language more interesting and more rewarding if you ask yourself the question should I study the system of radicals should I learn the history of this character to the extent that it's knowable should I learn to break this down into its component parts I think the reverse question is what alternative do you have as surreal and strange as it is Birdman heart cliff these are the types of pictographic puzzles that you'll be memorizing in thousands if you're serious about learning written Chinese