Learn Chinese characters

For beginners who learn Chinese language, it is always more difficult to learn Chinese characters than anything else. However there is a way out. It’s been proven by many learners that learning Chinese characters by category will help them better learning mandarin.

How? Let’s take a look at the following group of Chinese characters as an example: “X 光”(guāng)", “可口可乐”(coca cola) , “麦克风”(microphone), “比基尼”(bikini), “超市”(supermarket). This group of characters didn’t exist in the Chinese language because they come from English. We can this group of characters wai4 lai2 ci2, words coming from other country or language. Foreign as they are, they have been existing in Chinese publications and people’s daily life now.

It means to substitute the foreign morpheme with the same or similar native morpheme, only borrowing the foreign meaning. In Chinese school, this means a shift in the meaning of some established native Chinese Characters, so as to accommodate the meaning of English words. That is, the word has already existed in Chinese language, when borrowing the same word from English, people assimilated some of its meaning in English which are new to Chinese, and then the meaning of this word in Chinese has been extended. Sometimes, the work is accomplished through an intermediary. And English “zhuan jie ci” in Chinese mainly comes from Japanese.

Does this article help you some in learning mandarin? Write to me if you have any question concerning mandarin study.