Spelling and word games

Some things about this Chinese separation of phonetics for writing are pretty cool and some pretty strange. You can read without saying the words to yourself, for instance, and you can understand things you read without being able to communicate them to someone else. You can say things you haven't got a clue how to write. Doing this makes me realize how much I rely on spelling, and how closely my spoken language is linked to it. When I say something, the written version is a split second away, or even closer, hanging somewhere inside my head. When learning French, I remember noting that I was never able/willing to say anything which I did not know how to write. But here, I can't insist on that, and it's strangely liberating. The characters I know best I still sort of 'see' when I say them, but I am perfectly fine saying things I wouldn't be able to recognize on paper. I guess I still insist on knowing the pinyin and tone of everything, but that's because it's essential information if you want to be able to say the word correctly. In English, you can say things totally right without being able to spell them correctly (though you'd probably have a good idea). It's sort of hard to explain.

With no alphabet, you can't ask someone to spell a new word for you. You can look it up in the dictionary by its pinyin, but there are so many homophones it is often not easy to figure out which is the one you heard, and in a quick conversation setting you need a quicker option, and there are several. The most common is to try to figure out if the character is used in another character combination you are familiar with. As a simple example in English, say you learn the new phrase red-eye, and you want to know what the 'red' character is. You might say, 'is that red as in 'I read a book?' And your friend would say, 'no, it's not, it's red as in 'red bull' or 'red, white and blue.' This option only works if you already know the character but haven't yet associated it with this particular meaning/phrase. The second possible method is to have the person write the character out for you. This seems obvious, but what I mean mostly is not with a pen, but usually by tracing the character with a finger on a hand or a table. You've got to watch carefully for this to work. Thirdly, they might explain what radicals make it up: 'well, it's got a tree radical on the left, and then a sheep radical on the right.' There are names for each of the strokes, too, which can be used to help 'there's a horizontal line then a downward hook, and a little dot.'

Along with no spelling comes no spelling bees, no crossword puzzles, no word searches, no boggle, no ghost and no scrabble. Instead there are other word games based on characters, which I am just getting to the surface of, and looking forward to more of. There are lots sort of like rebus puzzles, where you have to put together clues about the radicals that make up characters and maybe some clues about the pronunciation. While the commonality of puns makes them not very funny or clever in most situtations, it opens a lot of possibilities here. Another I really enjoy is to start with a simple character (like 日) and try to come up with all the characters which can be made by adding only one stroke (申，电，白，旦，旧）, or two strokes, etc.