Post the Sixth: Totally Looks Like...

First things first: today is Monday. Monday is apparently drain the sewage from the pipes day at Harbin Institute of Technology. All day there have been huge tank-bearing trucks parked alongside the roads. As soon as one of these trucks pulls up to a manhole, all conversation in the vicinity ceases and people literally book it out of there. The workers waited until about 8PM to handle the drain in the parking lot outside our dorm. I can tell you that the stench is DELIGHTFUL and makes an excellent study aid.

Anyways...

I've been thinking a lot about Chinese characters lately. A LOT. Probably because I have a million of them to learn every night. In order to expedite memorization, I've begun employing one of my favorite study strategies: character pictionary.

Chinese characters are a form of phono-semantic compound; they symbolize physical objects and abstract ideas through the addition of a determinative radical (which supplies meaning) to a rebus building-block character (which supplies sound). Traditional Chinese characters, with their deliberate strokes and overall structure, look quite similar to the things they represent. Unfortunately, the simplification of the Chinese writing system, while making my job here in Harbin easier (as well as increasing literacy in a country of over 1.4 billion people), has stripped some of the characters of that quality. I've still managed, however, to find other characters that adhere to their phono-semantic origins. I wanted to share some examples with readers back home (aka my parents) who don't necessarily speak Chinese:

• 宿舍 (sùshè) – dormitory; the first character is composed of 百 (băi, hundred) and 人 (rén, person), which makes sense: a hundred people living together under one roof.

• 怀孕 (huáiyùn) – to be pregnant; the second character 孕 (yùn, pregnancy) has a little 子 zĭ-child being born from the B-shaped-mother-thing (it actually means "to be" and the first character means "bosom" so I guess "the child of the bosom"?)

• 好 (hăo) – good; the character is composed of 女 (nǚ, female) and 子 (zĭ, child), which should be obvious since a woman plus her child is good. Credit to my high school Chinese teacher for this one.

• 串 (chuàn) – 1) to string together, 2) a cluster, 3) meat kebab; this character is composed of two things speared on a stick. Any questions?

• 门 (mén) – door; no explanation needed, just walk through it and try not to get hit by the falling brick on the top left corner.

• 楼 (lóu) – building/floor; this is one of those characters that you just sort of have to come up with your own way to remember it. 木 (mù), 米 (mĭ), and 女 (nǚ) combined translates to wood-rice-woman and obviously refers to a building, right?
•  率 (lǜ) – rate or ratio; When I first encountered this character, I didn’t think I would ever be able to master it. Then I realized the little dot things look like the falling numbers from the Matrix movies. The Matrix is all about a computer code generating an alternate reality. Computer codes use numbers to encode information. Numbers are used to measure things and make comparisons. These measurements and comparisons translate to rates and ratios. Phew.
• 腐败 (fŭbài) – corruption; this is one of my favorites. I like to think that it’s derived from the character 政府 (zhèngfŭ, government). You’ll notice that the bottom part of the first character features a 肉 (ròu, meat). Translation: if your government would rather sit on a bunch of meat than eat it or give it to the needy, it’s probably corrupt.
  
  

I should really write my own textbook. In the mean time, back to the books!

魏德