Have you ever gotten the feeling while running into a new character that you can almost guess its meaning and pronunciation before you look it up? I remember this occurring to me for the first time when I saw a massive advert for Spiderman 3 in the subway. I had never seen or heard the Chinese word for spider in my life, but one look at 蜘蛛 and I could only imaging pronouncing it “zhīzhū”. The word 蜘蛛, as it turned out, is a perfect example of 形聲字 / 形声字 (xíng-shēngzì) or semantic-plus-phonetic characters. While the 虫 (chóng) radical tells the reader that this character relates semantically to an insect of some kind, both the 知 (zhī) and 朱 (zhū) give us a wonderful clue toward the word’s pronunciation, which in this case happens to be dead on.
In modern times, semantic-plus-phonetic characters make up over 80% of ordinary or everyday Chinese character usage (statistic from Prof. Ye Deming). Not every semantic-plus-phonetic characters come as neatly packaged as “spider,” especially since Mandarin is still a relatively new pronunciation system compared to Chinese characters. However, being aware of semantic-plus-phonetic rules can not only greatly increase your awareness of how Chinese characters are composed, but also aid in both memory retention and memory recall skills.
Let’s take an example from a children’s rhyme “青蛙有對大眼睛” / “青蛙有对大眼睛” (qīng wā yǒu duì dà yǎnjīng: Little frog with a big pair of eyes) as shown below. We will focus on the semantic-plus-phonetic characters highlighted in red.
山青水清天氣晴，
shān qīng shuǐ qīng tiān qì qíng
青蛙有對大眼睛
qīng wā yǒu duì dà yǎnjīng
吃飽蚊蟲心情好，
chī bǎo wén chóng xīn qíng hǎo
請來蜜蜂與蜻蜓
qǐng lái mì fēng yŭ qīng tíng
你們跳舞我拍和
Nǐ men tiào wŭ wǒ pāi hé
呱呱，呱呱，呱呱呱。
Guā guā， guā guā，guā guā guā
Green hill, clear water and sunny sky,
little green frog with a big pair of eyes.
Full of insects, feeling good,
Please come join me bees and dragonflies.
You do the dance, I’ll clap the harmony.
Croak-croak, croak-croak, croak-croak-croak.
Over the course of the rhyme we are presented with the following seven characters:
- 青 qīng (green)
- 清 qīng (clear)
- 晴 qíng (bright; sunny)
- 睛 jīng (eye)
- 情 qíng (feeling; emotion)
- 請 qǐng (request)
- 蜻 qīng (dragonfly)
All lined up, it is clear that 青 is the phonetic component of all the characters that follow. Being aware of such relationships certainly helps point one in the general direction of saying the character correctly, but what about the meaning? With the exception of 青, which has its own semantic-plus-phonetic features, all of the meaning lies in the semantic component, or the radicals. For 清 (clear) we are clued into the characters meaning by 氵(water variant). Similarly 日 (sun), 目 (eye), 忄（heart variant), 言 (speech) and 虫 (insect) all hold the clues necessary to unlock the character’s meaning.
As I mentioned in my previous post about
Chinese characters conscious awareness goes along way in helping recall and retention. In the example above it takes you from knowing they all sound like 青 to full understand. And since so much of modern Chinese uses a form of semantic-plus-phonetic creation it is worth your while to take notice! Of course things are not always this cut and dry, but even knowing the basics will bring you one step closer to making Chinese characters less of a mystery.
Do you have a favorite “aha character” that you wish to share? Leave them in the comments below.
See you next week!
下個星期見／下个星期见
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jake@skritter.com
