Guilt, Pt. 2: "Why don't you read more?"

[muckefuck]

So one of my Friends (and real-life friends) is trying to use the shame of her LJ peers to motivate her to read more Improving Literature. I'll be interested to see how her experiment goes. After all, it was not for nothing that owenthomas clept me "Externally-Motivated Boy" and, in twenty years' time, that aspect of my character still hasn't changed much. I've also got stacks (literally now, since I'm halfway through a reordering and reshelving project) of unread good books collecting dust and I'd love to find some way of getting me to get through them.

Right now, I'm painstakingly making my way through some Chinese short stories in Simplified Characters as a way of building my vocabulary and comfort level. The problem is I really hate Simplified Characters--and they're starting to make me hate Chinese.

I've never really liked spoken Chinese, and not just because I'm better at learning to read and write than learning to speak and understand in general. It was actually in Korean class that I began being required to memorise characters and I found that I was better at learning them than pure Korean vocabulary in Han'geul. Something about their forms has always excited me, causing me to overlook just what an ungodly, time-sucking pain in the ass it is to actually have to learn thousands of arbitrary symbols simply in order to read the most basic texts.

As a result, at first, I thought my primary objections to Simplified were merely aesthetic. Gradually, though, I'm beginning to realise a deeper problem: I've sunk a tremendous amount of energy over the years in some very narrow pattern-recognition and -recall skills tied to a very specific set of symbols. Now I'm being forced to relearn hundreds of these symbols, only I have to learn new skills in order to do that, and I resent it.

For instance, until I bought my new pocket Oxford dictionary, every character reference I owned had pretty much two things in common: It used (1) Traditional forms of characters ordered according to (2) the Kangxi radicals. Now, the case has been made that the radicals are arbitrary, that they don't really have the helpful meanings sometimes attributed to them, that it's difficult to relate their different forms to one another, and so forth.

All of those criticisms are true. But, nevertheless, over the past couple decades I've learned their quirks. But the Oxford doesn't use the Kangxi radicals. That is, it uses some but not others, and, even for the ones it does use, it indexes characters with reduced variants separately from those with full forms. So now I have to completely relearn the most annoying part of any dictionary: The character index.

Looking up unfamiliar words is becoming a huge chore. The dictionary is in alphabetical order by Pinyin romanisation, so unless I can guess the pronunciation already (and this harder now that many of the cues I've come to rely on have been trashed in the name of "Simplification"), looking up anything takes three steps: 1. Identify the radical and find it in the radical index. 2. Find the pronunciation of the character in the list of those containing said radical. 3. Find the entry for the appropriate character among those others with the same pronunciation.

Madness, isn't it? Any other language, and you could go straight to the equivalent of a phonetic index since there's actually a relationship between how the words are written and how they're pronounced. Over time, I'd learned the order of the Kangxi radicals, so I could skip step 1, and, when the entries were ordered by radical, I could often skip step 2 as well.

But unless we decide to cancel our plans at great expense and fly to Taiwan or Hong Kong instead, I just have to suck it up and get cozy with Simplified. To that end, I'm making a list of the most troublesome characters, those whose correspondence to characters I already know well keeps escaping my memory. Expect more updates as the list grows.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

The dictionary is in alphabetical order by Pinyin romanisation

I've never tried to deal with Chinese in any form, but that just sounds like a horrible idea. Romanisations of Arabic are the bane of my life; I keep just wanting the Arabic characters, which I might be able to read, and wondering why anyone would add a step between their reader and comprehension (since there must be very few people who can make anything of the romanisation and can't use characters)

I thought my primary objections to Simplified were merely aesthetic. Gradually, though, I'm beginning to realise a deeper problem: I've sunk a tremendous amount of energy... Now I'm being forced to relearn... and I resent it
I have an idea that our aesthetic judgements are almost never autonomous, and that something like this (utility, or ease of remembering, or patterning) generally lurks underneath them, just out of sight. I can't give any good examples right now, however. Like everything I manage to think about, it seems obvious but hard to prove.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Chinese isn't like other languages. Because the writing system gives no clear indication of pronunciation, a dictionary intended for foreigners must include phonetic information in the entries as well as a phonetic index (or two). My Taiwanese dictionaries use both romanisation and Bopomofo, but they don't arrange main entries by either.

I think Bopomofo provides the best arrangement, since it groups sounds by place of articulation ("bo", "po", "mo", "fo" represent the first four intials, all labials) and many characters with the same phonetic have pronunciations which differ only in manner of articulation (e.g. aspiration, plosivity, etc.). That is, if you see an element that is sometimes zhong and sometimes chong, you can find those in adjoining sections of a Bopomofo index.

I don't normally have any good thing to say about Wade-Giles, but it was better than Pinyin in this regard since aspiration was indicated with an apostrophe. That is, chung and ch'ung (the equivalents of the Pinyin syllables above) would be in adjoining sections rather than at opposite ends of the index.

[zompist.livejournal.com]

I have kind of the opposite problem: my dictionaries are based on Simplified, so it's a hassle to try to read
Traditional texts. (Or to look up things in Karlgren, though I did make a Simplified/Karlgren index for myself.)

Recently I read some guy's rant about learning Chinese, and how you can study Mandarin for ten years and still not be able to read a newspaper. (To say nothing of how people would show him something in wényán, which he couldn't read, and annoyingly conclude that he really didn't know Chinese.)

The article did suggest that the easiest way to look up characters is the four-corner method... have you ever tried that?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I didn't know there were dictionaries with four-corner lookup indexes. I've only heard of it in connexion with word processing.

My first ever Chinese dictionary was arranged by initial stroke and stroke count, which was murder on someone who didn't know how to write any Chinese. Eventually, I figured out how to use it, which--somewhat paradoxically--was a great help when I actually taught myself how to write characters.

My teacher has always insisted that learning Simplified is trivial for someone who knows Traditional, but the reverse is not true. However, I'm beginning to suspect that the transition is about equally hard from either direction.