A word from another Kanji country, China
David J. Krus
Arizona State University

To a Westerner, the Chinese name Yi Wen ( 意　文 ) may not mean more than a name. But to a speaker of Chinese, Yi means mind, with connotations of spirit, feelings, intentions, thoughts, gentle, refined. Wen evokes associations pertaining to literature and fine arts. The first character, Yi, consists of radicals depicting sun, rise, and heart. When the sun rises, the world awakens, and the sound of life begins. Together with the radical depicting the heart, this character means 'mind, the sound of the heart.' The character Wen is used not only to denote belles-lettres, but also to depict the literature of the sky, astronomy. Thus, in combination, these two characters convey the message that to find meaning, look into your heart and aspire for the stars. Chinese names often have rich associations, are pronounced in tonal cascades, and are capable of evoking abundant images, both visual and acoustical.

There is no upper limit on the number of Chinese characters. To function in a Chinese society, one should know about 3,000. To function at the college level, one should know about 7,000. The shared opinion among students of Chinese is that only after learning about 1,500 characters does one begin to realize the enormity of the task undertaken.

It takes at least seven years of concerted effort to learn functional Chinese. There are many approaches to learning Mandarin Chinese. Computer-assisted multimedia instructional technologies may change all of this, but there is a consensus among instructors of Chinese that the best results are attained by western adult learners when initially guided by instructors who teach them how to speak and do not use pictographs. This may lead to an ability to speak conversational Chinese, but provides only limited insight into the Chinese culture.

Compared to Chinese, learning English for native speakers of other European languages is relatively easy. The common Indo-European roots of these languages provide a latent network of shared meaning. Also, the shared vocabulary of classical Latin and Greek make learning easier. The scientific and technical terms like "physics,'' "chemistry," "psychology," "catalyst," are the same, as are the names of for a telescope, a computer, a bank, and a telephone. In Chinese, the word "psychology" sounds differently and looks differently, represented by characters resembling a heart and that of a student into whose head an instructor's hands pour knowledge. A telephone is "electrical speech," computer is "electrical brain," and a bank is associated with ingots of silver.

The names of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Beatles, and Madonna, spelled and pronounced in a similar way throughout most of the world, are written in Chinese as pictographic renderings of approximated sounds with unrelated, disparate meanings. In the case of Shakespeare, four characters representing his name remotely sound like his name, but mean, in turn, "a herb," "a gentleman," "to compare," and "second in excellence" ( ).

Beethoven is spelled by chaining characters  signifying, in turn, " a sea-shell," "many," and "fragrant." One has to know that this particular string of characters has to be decoded for sound, not for the meaning. Native speakers of Chinese are able to make this distinction by initially decoding a string of characters for meaning. If the string is meaningless, they decode it for sound. However, most students of Chinese do not have the self-confidence to decide that a string of characters is, indeed, meaningless. This difficulty for non-native speakers of Chinese is so great that the Japanese, who adapted Chinese characters for their own language, developed a separate alphabet, Katakana, to transliterate foreign words and names.

Upon encountering an unknown flower, a botanist looks at its corolla and calyx, identifies the type of petals, and counts the number of stamens within its androecium. In this fashion he or she is able to find the name of the plant in a herbarium. In a similar fashion, Chinese, upon encountering an unknown character, first identify the basic component of a character, called its root. Next, they count the number of its strokes, thus zeroing in on the character’s position within the general nomenclature. Then they search a dictionary's index within the likely confines of the identified category, hoping to spot the unknown character by using visual matching. Once the character is located within the index, one notes the number with which it is associated. What remains is to find the character in the dictionary, where the characters are listed in a numerical sequence. If the character is not located within the index, it is possible that perhaps the dictionary does not contain the character, or that the initially selected root signified a clue to the pronunciation of a character and not to its meaning. In that case the next root is identified and the process, described above, is repeated. A similar process is involved when one tries to find a person's phone number in a phone directory. This is to illustrate that Chinese and Japanese cognitive processes are likely to be somewhat different from that of other people.