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Chinese Handwriting Series On Chinese-Forums


Renzhe

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Is chinese script some what similar to the script in the same region like japanese or korean or thai?

 

Do they have common alphabets?

Edited by silver ink

"On every dishonest man,there are two watchmen,his possessions and his way of living."

Hazrat Umar bin Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him)

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"Chinese" usually refers to a Han language. Han is the name of the ethnic majority in China. Of course, there are other Chinese languages like Manchu and Khitan, but in most discourse, Chinese refers to Han. Han languages are written in Han characters. Neighboring civilizations like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary along with the writing system. Later, these civilizations developed/adopted other writing systems. Koreans usually write in Hangul and only use Chinese characters in special situations. Japanese usually uses Chinese characters for open class vocabulary and kana for closed class vocabulary. Vietnamese is currently written in Latin characters. That's a rough description. You'll have to read about specific languages to get the details.

Edited by Renzhe

Renzhe

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Is chinese script some what similar to the script in the same region like japanese or korean or thai?

 

Do they have common alphabets?

 

Japanese uses some Chinese characters. I forget the name for that writing.

 

Chinese has no alphabet. For me, writing Chinese is a huge struggle because I really battle to get the characters into my head. I've had to make up stories to do it. For example: two golfers in a corral yelled "four". Why? Because it's square with two golf clubs inside it. And I know my spelling isn't appropriate for golf, but is appropriate for the number 4 which is what I'm trying to remember.

 

ETA: Renzhe has posted a much more knowledgeable explanation of the writing systems.

Edited by Waski_the_Squirrel

Proud resident of the least visited state in the nation!

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My Japanese friend tells me that she can read most simplified chinese characters because kanji came from hanzi. This is probably becuase the Japanese are originally from China, many millennia ago

Edited by WateryFlow
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ok sir so chinese writing is like drawing a scenario?

 

if you want to write something related to golf or golfers then you have to draw golf clubs?

Edited by silver ink

"On every dishonest man,there are two watchmen,his possessions and his way of living."

Hazrat Umar bin Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him)

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ok sir so chinese writing is like drawing a scenario?

 

if you want to write something related to golf or golfers then you have to draw golf clubs?

 

The Chinese writing system is not pictograms. What they do is combine characters to make words, much like the way they combine words to make new words. For example, cell phone is "hand machine" or things is "east-west".

 

I had to look up golf, but here are the characters:

 

http://z.about.com/d/chineseculture/1/0/K/V/golf.gif

 

It's made up of syllables that sound like the word "golf" with a little extra tacked on.

Proud resident of the least visited state in the nation!

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ok now i know that its not pictogram.thanks for explaining.

 

so if in future a new hand held gadget is invented,they will add characters to the existing "hand machine" character to express it?

"On every dishonest man,there are two watchmen,his possessions and his way of living."

Hazrat Umar bin Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him)

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ok now i know that its not pictogram.thanks for explaining.

 

so if in future a new hand held gadget is invented,they will add characters to the existing "hand machine" character to express it?

 

Good question. They may do that, or they may put some syllables together that sound like the device. Chinese is kind of wild because when we say "Chinese" we're actually referring to a group of languages that use the same writing system but sound quite different. That's one of the differences in a non-alphabetic writing system. In English, we may have different accents, but we are mutually intelligible, and unlikely to stray too far just because our written language gives some clue how to pronounce words.

Edited by Waski_the_Squirrel

Proud resident of the least visited state in the nation!

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I'm glad someone pointed this out, Hanji is not really an alphabet by definition. Hanji is really a logographic syllabary. Each character represents a syllable, not a single phonetic sound. Each character can also represent a word or idea on it's own. Hanji are also used in Japanese as Kanji and Hanja in South Korea. Alongside the borrowed characters in Japanese and Korean (which may have different meanings and readings than they would in Chinese,) both languages have their own, unique writing systems. Japanese has two syllabaries; Hiragana, used for native words with no Kanji, where the Kanji is too obscure for the audience or for furigana, a reading aid for Kanji. Katakana is used for loan words, transcripting foreign words, onomatopoeia, many scientific terms and often, company names. Korean Hangul, on the other hand, is an actual alphabet, however, unlike typical Latin or Cyrillic orthography, is written in morphemic or syllabic blocks of two or three; no "letter" in Hangul may stand alone. An example would be 서울특별시, 서 consists of ㅅ, s and ㅓ, eo; 울 consists of ㅇ, a null in this case, ㅜ, ou and ㄹ, l. So the first two blocks are read as Seoul and consist of five letters. The last three blocks consist of 8 letters and read: teuk-byeol-si.

The hardest part about learning some other languages is the writing system. Not all writing systems are alphabets, which can add an extra layer of difficulty for students. I didn't even go into Hebrew and Arabic which are abjads.

 

Edit: In DPRK Hangul is called Chosongul and Korean language is Chosonmal instead of Hangul and Hangugmal or Hangugeo, respectively, as in South Korea. S. Korea refers to Korea as Hanguk, DPRK still calls Korea as Choseon. You may also find people of Korean heritage that live elsewhere in the world that refer to the Korean language as Goryeomal and to themselves as Goryeoin. Goryeo was likely the first Korean dynasty to have contact with the West and it is from that name that Corean and later Korean came into English.

Edited by paultyler_82

<em class='bbc'>I started nowhere, ended up back there. I caught a fever and it burned up my blood. It was a pity, I left the city; I did me some travelin' but it's done me no good.</em> - Buffalo Clover "The Ruse"

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Nobody said this clearly so first I should inform you that there are different kinds of Chinese characters. There are at least pictograms, ideograms, ideogrammic compounds, phono-semantic compounds, and rebus characters.

so if in future a new hand held gadget is invented,they will add characters to the existing "hand machine" character to express it?

"Hand machine" isn't one character. It is a word of two characters: 手機, where 手 is "hand" and "機" is "machine." New words are created using a similar method. For example "smartphone" is 智能手機 (knowledge -able hand machine) and "smartwatch" will likely be 智能手錶 "knowledge -able hand watch" or something similar.

Renzhe

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Good question. They may do that, or they may put some syllables together that sound like the device. Chinese is kind of wild because when we say "Chinese" we're actually referring to a group of languages that use the same writing system but sound quite different. That's one of the differences in a non-alphabetic writing system. In English, we may have different accents, but we are mutually intelligible, and unlikely to stray too far just because our written language gives some clue how to pronounce words.

ok sir thanks for explaining.

 

non alphabetic writing systems are indeed complex

 

have you seen the burmese script?

 

it looks totally different to chinese or other scripts of the region.

"On every dishonest man,there are two watchmen,his possessions and his way of living."

Hazrat Umar bin Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him)

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Nobody said this clearly so first I should inform you that there are different kinds of Chinese characters. There are at least pictograms, ideograms, ideogrammic compounds, phono-semantic compounds, and rebus characters.

"Hand machine" isn't one character. It is a word of two characters: 手機, where 手 is "hand" and "機" is "machine." New words are created using a similar method. For example "smartphone" is 智能手機 (knowledge -able hand machine) and "smartwatch" will likely be 智能手錶 "knowledge -able hand watch" or something similar.

ok sir

thanks for explaining

i will try to learn few characters

"On every dishonest man,there are two watchmen,his possessions and his way of living."

Hazrat Umar bin Khattab (May Allah be pleased with him)

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ok sir thanks for explaining.

 

non alphabetic writing systems are indeed complex

 

have you seen the burmese script?

 

it looks totally different to chinese or other scripts of the region.

 

I don't know much about Burmese except that the writing is really pretty. I know that the writing system is an alphabet, but I have no idea how this language compares to Chinese. I also don't know the history of the writing system.

Proud resident of the least visited state in the nation!

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For those of you who write Chinese, I just wanted to let you know that there's a series on Chinese handwriting on Chinese-forums (with samples in pencil; I apologize).

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44507-handwriting-the-minimum-requirements-blog-series/

OMG. This is completely awesome. I've been looking for a series on Chinese writing, particularly just using simple pencils/pens. Thanks! If only it were in video form so you could see the writing being done real-time.

Edited by sotto2

http://i59.tinypic.com/ekfh5f.jpg

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silver ink,

 

Sorry for coming in late.

 

Your "hand-machine" example is actually a Mainland China habit to render everything down to two-syllables. A little like German, the Chinese language produces "compounds" by stitching individual characters together. To take your example:

 

"Hand - carry - electric - conversation - machine" refers to mobile phone, but it's simplified as "hand - machine". I consider it as a bad habit from the Mainland because it's very arbitrary, before "hand - machine" became common, "hand - electric" was used as well, which was equally absurd, if not more so. I am waiting for them to figure out what they would call "hand - cranked - break - meat - machine" (hand-cranked meat grinder), or perhaps a thousand other possibilities.

No, I am not going to list my pens here.

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