Hanzi of the day! 盲

Hi everyone!

As my Chinese improves (or at least my confidence about it, not sure language skills wise), I chance upon lots of new characters and I try to create some mnemonics for myself to learn them.

Today's character 盲 máng consists of the character 亡 (meaning lose, flee, die and deceased) on top of an eye 目, making up the lovely combination of death of the eye!

There are actually a number of characters which use this particular formula, notably:

• 忘 to forget, the death of the heart. The astute reader will note that I have written about it on this very blog!
• 妄 preposterous, the death of a woman. That one is funny, albeit it doesn't make any sense semantically. Here 亡 serves as a phonetic component, because its pronunciation wàng is almost the same as the pronunciation of 妄 wáng.

Incredibly, native Chinese speakers are seldom aware of these connections (unless they are Chinese scholars) and the reason is that first and second language Chinese learners acquire character knowledge in a very different way:

Native Chinese speakers learn to write almost exclusively as children. They are in no rush to learn the 5000 or so characters required, they take their time over 12 years of study:

• Children repeatedly write characters many times over, in a specific stroke order. This primes them for a strong enactment effect, where using the correct writing sequence helps memorise the characters. There are papers about it, albeit studying second language learners mostly.
• First language speakers do not need to understand the glyph origin in order to memorise it. Logogram history and logic, while very interesting (to me), is not necessary for achieving literacy

Furthermore, there's an inherent difference of acquiring a logographic writing system as an adult versus as a child:

Adults usually don't have the same free time to allocate to the task as children. Pesky things such as jobs, chores, raising their own kids, etc, do tend to get in the way of the pursuit of knowledge. If I had the time, and 12 years to spare, I could learn writing Chinese in the same way as school children. I might even learn a tad bit faster, due to adults in general having better pattern recognition skills.

Most adults, especially nowadays, have limited scope when it comes to learning to read and write Chinese as a second language. The digital age has ensured that we mostly need to be able to read: we can use phonetic input such as pinyin or zhuyin to write Chinese. Strictly speaking, recognising and reading Chinese characters is much more important than the ability to handwrite them. At least when it comes to hobbyists like me, I am sure second language Chinese scholars have impeccable writing skills.

Second language Chinese learners are thus incentivised to efficiently allocate their time in a way that maximises their reading skills, not their writing skills. This inevitably means poorer writing and heavier use of mnemonics, glyph origins trivia and phonetic information as tools that aid memorisation.

I personally have found that writing is incredibly helpful when it comes to acquiring reading proficiency but inevitably I have to balance the time I spend writing characters versus the time I spend memorising new vocabulary.

That's it from me! I will see you all next time!

Nick