Written Chinese, and being illiterate

It's a strange feeling to be illiterate here. It's different from being able to read a foreign language but not understand it (such as we can do with Italian, French, or Spanish, for instance). I guess it's comparable to being surrounded by Russian or Korean or any language that's written with a different alphabet. Then, too, you can't read the names of places or look words up in the dictionary. But Chinese illiteracy goes a step further because that initial overwhelming illiteracy goes away painfully gradually. The difference is that in most languages, there's an alphabet to learn, and after a short struggle, you can read anything. Written Chinese, though, is not phonetic, and two months in, I'm still frequently surrounded by incomprehensible, inaccessible material.

So those rumors are true - Chinese has no alphabet. When you look at written Chinese characters, you can't sound out how they should be pronounced. Each character does represent a syllable, but may have a different pronuncation depending on its usage, and many characters often represent the same syllable. There are only 411 possible syllables (I don't really know how this compares with other languages, but one of the particularities is that you can't create any more. You can't 'rearrange the letters' to make a new sound combination, because there are no letters to rearrange.) Multiply those 411 syllables by the 4 tones, and you get 1644 possible monosyllabic pronunciations (the actual number in use is less because not every syllable exists in all four tones). Yet this 1644 is not the number of Chinese characters either since each one is represented by anywhere from 1 to over 40 characters - which character is used depends on the meaning. I've read that the total number of characters is upwards of 50,000, though many of these are rare and you only need to know 3,000-4,000 to be literate. I think most educated Chinese know over 10,000.

How in the world can you learn even 3,000 characters? It definitely involves feats of memorization to instantaneously recall the correlation between written character and phonetic syllable. It's kind of like a giant game of memory - a multi-dimensional memory game, in fact - because you also need to associate other information somewhat arbitrarily with each character: one of the four tones, a meaning, and some information about how to use it. Put this way, it sounds kind of impossible or at least tedious, but the characters are aesthetically pleasing to read and write, and are interesting. Though some characters' representations are arbitrary, or the reason for them has been lost or distorted, many make some sort of sense. The characters are built of smaller units called radicals that can be found in various combinations within them. There are about 225 of these radicals, though some are much more common than others. Each radical has a meaning associated with it -- for instance, 氵means water, 口 means mouth, and 刀 means knife -- and are found in characters which have something to do with that meaning, such as:

渴 - thirsty, 海 - sea, 泡 - bubble
唱 - sing, 咳嗽 - cough
分 - to divide, 切 - to cut

Besides the radicals making up a single character, many words are made up of two or more characters (such as cough above), and this combination of characters is also often interesting and creative. In a way, learning characters is like studying Latin roots to understand the meaning of English words, or even just considering the reason our words and phrases are constituted the way they are. While I'm on the topic, one of my favorite examples of the radicals adding to the meaning of words is in the Chinese periodic table -- just from looking at the characters, you can till which ones are gases, which are metals, and which are non-metals because they have the air/gas (气), metal (钅), and stone (石) radicals respectively (see http://www.limestone.on.ca/ibuild/davies/chinesept.html). This doesn't seem very fair for a chemistry test, though.

But back to this issue of illiteracy - the reasoning within the characters only gives a hint, at best, to the meaning, and doesn't tell you how to pronounce the character. To be fair, sometimes there is a radical within the character which hints at the sound - has nothing to do with the meaning, but is either part of another character or is itself an independent character which has the same or similar sound. For example, the above character for bubble is pronounced 'pao,' while the right part, when independent, is itself a character， 包, pronounced 'bao.' Still, you can never be completely sure that what you see in new character is a pronunciation clue.

So, as in the pao/bao example above, there is a standard way to write Chinese pronunciation using the Roman alphabet. Very, very occasionally these are printed on signs. This is called pin yin, and is essential for studying Chinese, but can't really replace the characters for several reasons (the most important probably being the issue of homonyms and the fact that many dialects of Chinese do not use the 'standard' pronunciation but can still read any Chinese text because the characters are the same).

Not being able to read unknown words is quite an obstacle for learning a language, and I would say slows it down considerably. First, it takes a long time to learn each character. It is generally not enough just to look at a character to be able to remember it and write it, I find that I must practice and write it myself many times first. And, how can you look up words you don't know in the dictionary if there's no 'alphabetical order' to follow? The traditional way to solve this involves counting the number of strokes in teh major radical in the character and then in the rest of the character, and is a rather cumbersome process. In general, I bypass this by either asking any Chinese person in the vicinity to read the character to me and then look it up by its pin yin, or by drawing it into my electronic dictionary or my computer, which then skillfully recongnizes it (or rather giving me a list of characters it thinks I might be attempting to draw). Still, not very convenient.

Typing Chinese is also not particularly convenient, but also kind of fun. I type to use online dictionaries, to chat on the web with friends, and most often to send text messages on my phone. The keyboard can't have thousands of characters obviously, so entry is by the standardized pin yin. Once you type in a syllable, you're presented with all the options of characters which have that pronunciation. You can type a whole phrase or sentence, and the software tries to adapt and guess what you're saying, though you often have to correct it. My phone system doesn't have this, but it does try to offer suggestions for what the next character should be, based on the previous one or presenting the most commonly used characters. I worry a bit when I think I'm typing something very common but the computer doesn't come up with my phrase for me, and I can get an idea of how difficult my vocabulary words are by how far back they are in the list of characters the computer presents to me. It's still kind of astonishing for me to see it come up with characters, though I suppose it's not a very complicated computer program. I wish it was a bitter smarter though, and maybe could learn what phrases I commonly use and adapt to suggest these more readily. It's also rather inconvenient to be constanty alt-shifting my way between the four languages installed on my computer (English, French, Korean, and Chinese), to activate the right keyboard at the right time.

Despite not being able to read, I like going to the bookstore here - there are many of them. There are huge sections on learning English (which unfortunately can't very easily be used in reverse to learn Chinese because there's no pin yin). Most remarkably, there are always lots of people there. There aren't nice couches and coffeeshops, but there is space in the aisles and on the stairs and this can and is used for the same purpose. I like to look around at the different subjects, the way the books are organized, and see what people are reading. I bought a dictionary, and I bought a book for 8-12 year olds about ecology.

Books are cheap. They range from about about $1-6 generally. Also, there is a rather big business of photocopying them. You can take a book to one of many places on campus or in town where someone photocopies each page by hand and then uses glue to bind them together for you. This is bad for copyright reasons, but it's good for books which aren't available to buy -- such as books from the US shared among us foreign students, or for copying a book of violin exercises lent by my teacher, published in 1962 in Russia, and not available in China (I'm taking violin lessons here! more on this later).

I guess that after all, I shouldn't say I'm illiterate now. Being able to read is a slow process and I have a long way to go, but I can read so much more than before. And, the biggest difference is qualitative - even considering the characters I don't know yet, Chinese doesn't look so foreign anymore.