Gilbert C. Remillard's Blog

Chinese character 景

Scenery, view.

Circumstances, situation.

Here is the Chinese character for this special day, taken from Chinese Blockbuster 2.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

As a refresher, you need to use as many senses as you can to make the story work better. Close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

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Chinese character 浓[濃]

Concentrated, dense, thick

Here is the Chinese character of the week, taken from Chinese Blockbuster 6.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

As a refresher, you need to use as many senses as you can to make the story work better. Close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

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Chinese character 脉[脈]

Vein, blood vessels

Here is the Chinese character of the week, taken from Chinese Blockbuster 6.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

As a refresher, you need to use as many senses as you can to make the story work better. Close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

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Chinese character 肯

To be willing, to agree, to consent, to approve

Here is the Chinese character of the week, taken from Chinese Blockbuster 4.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

As a refresher, you need to use as many senses as you can to make the story work better. Close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

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译[譯]

To translate, interpret.

Components

讠[言] WORD + [image error][睪] LINEMAN

Here is a Chinese character taken from Chinese Blockbuster 5.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

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乞

To beg, plead for

Here is a Chinese character, taken from Chinese Blockbuster 1.

If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

As a refresher, you need to use as many senses as you can to make the story work better. Close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

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Just try to forget this character!
皮

Skin, leather, fur.

Here’s a Chinese character described in Chinese Blockbuster 2. If you are not familiar with the Chinese Blockbuster method, please see the user guide to understand the following description.

To better use your memory and improve retention of this Chinese character, I recommend that you visit this page on how to read Chinese.

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Anatomy of a Chinese character

Most Chinese characters are composed of building blocks or components that form part of a character and which are seen repeated in other characters. This way, the number of symbols to learn is drastically reduced. In other words, Chinese characters are not arbitrary symbols; they are composed of familiar building blocks, and there is an underlying logical structure guiding their construction. It is as if you had a box of Lego blocks containing yellow, blue, green and red bricks with a limited number of shapes, allowing you to create an almost unlimited number of structures with them.

While a few characters represent actual pictures (日 for sun， 月 for moon， 山 for mountain, 木 for tree) and symbols (一 for one， 二 for two， 三 for three), the great majority of Chinese characters are what we call sound-meaning compounds. They usually consist of a component taken from a list of 214 elements called radicals (more precisely Kangxi radicals, which are used by most Chinese dictionaries to organize their content, a bit like the 26 letters of the alphabet are used to order words in a Western dictionary), that gives a hint to the meaning of the character, combined to another part that gives a hint to its pronunciation. Most of the time, these two parts are also characters themselves.

Building Block Examples

Take for instance the following three characters:

1 根 gēn (root of a plant) 2 校 xiào (school) 3 村 cūn (village, hamlet)

They all have on the left side the character 木, a radical which means ‘tree, wood.’ It is used here to indicate that the character to which it belongs has something to do with wood: 1 the root of a plant, of a tree; 2 a wooden structure where you study; 3 a village with houses made of wood.

Written on the right side of the tree radical are components (and characters in their own rights) which give an indication to the sound of the main character.

1 艮 gěn (tough; stubborn) 2 交 jiāo (to deliver, hand over; to intersect)

3 寸cùn (Chinese inch)

Their meaning, in this case, does not contribute to the sense of the character to which they belong.

There are also what we call meaning-meaning compounds, where two or more semantic components are joined to create a new character that has a meaning derived from the sum of the meanings of all the components. For example, still using 木 as a radical, we have 析 xī (to separate, divide, split) where the right part 斤 jīn represents an ax, hence to separate, split wood with an ax;

the character 林 lín, where two trees are put next to each other to mean ‘grove, woods’; or the character 森 sēn, where three trees are grouped to mean ‘forest.’

With time, the characters underwent gradual changes, mostly phonetic changes but also shifts in meanings and structure to the point that lexicographers are not always able to trace them back to the original character. Therefore, some characters no longer appear on their own and do not have a meaning or a pronunciation of their own. They have essentially become ‘non-characters,’ but they continue to be used as building blocks to form more complex characters.

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How to make the sound of Chinese characters stick

Learning a language requires to be able to pronounce its words, and for Chinese characters, it means learning to pronounce pinyin syllables made up of initial and final phonemes.

Since not all initials can be combined to all finals, the total number of possible Chinese syllables is limited to 404. Also, not all syllables are pronounced in the four tones. The net result is that we get a total of about 1300 distinct syllables, which is far smaller than in a language such as English. Considering that there are roughly 6,000 Chinese characters still commonly used, this amounts to a lot of homophones, that is, different characters that are pronounced with the exact same sound and tone. It is therefore imperative to develop a system that would allow us to reduce the confusion and differentiate between all these homophones.

Mnemonics

When I devised my own system to read and remember Chinese characters, I wanted to use mnemonics to reproduce the sound of Mandarin. I then quickly realized that it was close to impossible to reproduce all Chinese sounds with enough precision by relying only on English sounds. For example, the letter ‘u’ in a pinyin syllable is pronounced as the English ‘u’ in some cases and as the German ‘ü’ or the French ‘u’ in some other cases (like in the pinyin yu). The ‘c’ in the pinyin ‘cun’ is best remembered as a German ‘z’ (which sounds like ‘ts’) while the ‘z’ of ‘zan’ sounds more like the Italian ‘z’ letter (sounds like ‘ds’). The initial ‘ch’ is a good match for the Spanish ‘ch’ sound and the initial ‘r’ sounds almost like the French ‘j.’

Europe to the rescue

This was when I realized that by using five European languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish and German) to create ‘sound words’ mimicking Chinese sounds, I had a fighting chance to better remember the pronunciation of the characters I was studying! This system allowed me to differentiate between similarly sounding initials (like the ‘c’ sound and the ‘z’ sound above), a frequent source of confusion for Chinese learners because some of them sound almost the same to our ears but they are in fact quite different. To learn characters well, you need to be able to make the difference and know which pinyin sound a character belongs to.

Sound words

The approach used in the Chinese Blockbuster series is to assign a sound word to each of these unique syllables, along with its tone. Part of this sound word, let’s call it the ‘sound part,’ stands for the Chinese pronunciation of the character under study. Sound words are designed to create an image in your mind that will become part of a story and will help you remember the proper pronunciation and tone of a character. Chinese sounds are reproduced in a variety of ways and the sound words selected may sometimes remain rough approximations in the case of sounds that are ‘very Chinese.’ Your brain won’t mind, though, because it will know after a while that a sound word is used to represent a specific pinyin and not another.

How to remember the tone too!

“Fine,” you might say, “but how do I know if a sound word is for a first, a second, a third or a fourth tone? And which part of the sound word should I focus on?” Here is how I solved this problem:

One-syllable sound words beginning with the sound part are used for the first tone.
Two-syllables sound words beginning with the sound part are used for the second tone.
Sound words with three or more syllables beginning with the sound part are used for the third tone.
Since four-syllable words are hard to come by, sound words ending with the sound part or having the sound part anywhere except at the beginning are used for the fourth tone.
The neutral tone is treated as a fourth tone as far as its sound word is concerned.

It is important to realize that what I mean by one syllable, two syllables and three syllables is not the actual number of grammatical syllables a word contains, but the number of pronounced syllables it has. For example, the English verb ‘choke’ has two grammatical syllables but is pronounced as a one-syllable word. It would therefore represent a first tone. On the other hand, Germans are known to pronounce all the syllables of their words. For example, the word ‘Zeuge,’ meaning ‘witness,’ is pronounced zeu-ge (with the ‘ge’ syllable clearly heard) and is used for a second tone.

As an example, here are the sound words selected for pinyin fa, ji and peng. The sound part of each sound word is underlined.

Pinyin
First tone
Second tone
Third tone
Fourth tone


fa
Fax
Fallen
Faraday
Sofa


ji
Jeep
Jitters
Jigsaw puzzle
Fiji


peng
Punk
Penguin
Penghulu
Alpenglow

As the example for peng demonstrates, the spelling of the sound word does not have to match the pinyin spelling. It just needs to sound like it. ‘Punk’ is not spelled like ‘peng,’ but the pronunciation is similar. I have attempted to select sound words that are a good phonetic representation of their Chinese counterparts, although they are not always a perfect match.

The Chinese Blockbuster series describes a few conventions used for the creation of sound words related to non-European sounds.

When in doubt about the pronunciation of a foreign sound word, I invite you to visit Forvo, the pronunciation dictionary online. It is a fantastic tool where you can hear native people pronounce a word in their language and it’s free.

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 “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

 

Mnemonics

A working memory is based on associations. Most of what you learned in life, even if you do not realize it, is done by way of mnemonics and connections between ideas and thoughts. You associate the new concept you are trying to learn with something you already know. After a while, the connections tend to disappear and the new idea or word is transferred to the long-term memory.

It has been shown that humans more easily remember surprising, humorous, silly and shocking stories. The more absurd, the better. Also, strong emotions help things stick. Most people remember where they were on September 11 or, for the older generation, when John F. Kennedy was shot. And you would probably remember better when your friend Joe decided to run naked in the street after having drunk too much than when he was average Joe on a typical day.

Stories

The stories that appear in the Chinese Blockbuster series are the glue to help you remember all there is to know about each character. They may refer to historical facts and events, but most of them are totally fabricated and filled to the brim with mnemonics. Some stories may also deal with harsh themes, as strong images are necessary for impressing our brain. Political correctness is not good to remember stuff. In fact, if we are shocked, we will remember the characters, their pronunciation and their building blocks better!

You will also notice that the stories often use ‘I’ in the present tense. This usage of the first person is not about me but about you. I want you to imagine yourself at the center of the action. You become the main character in the story. Also, most stories are written with the masculine gender, only to lighten the text.

Furthermore, if a German or Italian word is used as a sound word, the story may concern a German or an Italian person or it may place you somewhere in Germany or Italy, just to help you remember the proper sound word.

The stories are only examples of what is possible to achieve with this method. I even encourage you to make your own stories with the building blocks I provide. If you have more personal stories you can relate to, use them. They would work even better. Think of this book as a box of Lego blocks, where you can build the model shown on the box cover or make your own toy. For some of you, my madness may suit you just fine and that’s alright!

Use your senses

Finally, to make the stories work better, use as many senses as you can. When reading a story, close your eyes and see the building blocks with vivid colors (visual sense), odors (sense of smell) or as humongous objects when they are concrete things or as a struggling action when it is a verb, all the while hearing the sound word resonate or reverberate in your mind (audio). See the definitions as repeated, incessant actions when they concern verbs and adverbs, or as a swarm of objects when they represent concrete things.

I assure you that if you spend the extra effort to make the stories as vivid as you can, the characters will be yours and you will be reading Chinese in no time!

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