For The Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Part 43, click here.
How to delicately tiptoe around funny and dangerous numbers, and everything you need to know to start reading Chinese!
Bad numbers!
If I, the intrepid Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour nomad, were to say to someone: “You are two-hundred and fifty!” How exactly would or should a person respond?
Well, if the person knows in Chinese “two,” or “er (二)” in some contexts means “stupid,” and two-hundred and fifty or “er bai wu” means “extremely stupid,” he or she might justifiably get upset.
Or sometimes good.
In other circumstances, two is an auspicious number, given a pair, as in a happy couple, is a wonderful and beautiful thing! It all depends on how it’s used. Got it?
The point being, it’s a good idea to be at least a little careful with some Chinese numbers.
Great Numbers!
In Chinese, some numbers, are great numbers.
Eight, for example (八 bā) sounds like 发 (fā) which is the verb for (发财 fācái), which means to get rich! A great number!
Number nine, (九 jiǔ) sounds exactly the same as 久 (jiǔ) which means a long time and consequently is associated with long life, and eternity. So, Chinese couples often get married on September 9th, and a true romantic might send 99 roses to win the heart of the one they love.
A Really Bad Number!
However, the number four is really bad. In fact, it’s so bad that many buildings don’t list a 4th floor. Sometimes they put a letter “F” there instead, and often just skip it altogether. Why is it so terrible? Four in Chinese is sì (四). And look at that down-tone on sì. It leads to the end. Kaput! Game over.
Death in Chinese is sǐ (死) and used in a very large number of compound words that all refer to, yes, you guessed it: death.
One might think modern Chinese would laugh at old things like that, and some might. But more than most large groups of people, the Chinese are deeply connected to their written language in so many ways.
Reading and Writing Chinese
Learning Chinese writing is a bit more difficult than Romanized phonetic languages like European languages. And the training starts young, usually with mom and dad to get the ball rolling before school even begins.
First, Chinese characters are organized by character radical (like a root word usually on the left, but sometimes on top or beneath), number of strokes, and lastly by alphabetic order. For the record, there are 214 radicals. They can be found here. The truly diligent might facilitate memorizing them by referring to the original oracle bones to see how they originated, but most people just use their imagination in making meanings from the one-part characters.
From there, compound words are built.
If the reader is courageous, likes challenges, wants to exercise their memory, has a fascination with Chinese, or other good motivation, a great free beginning learning page is here: https://hsk.academy/en/learn/starting-with-learning-chinese
The HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi) is the international standardized exam for Chinese language, rather like IELTS and TOEFL for English, TOPIK for Korean, and so on.
That’s a million-dollar learning resource there, and all it takes is practice and patience. It’s a bit like swimming. The first try alone isn’t going to do it for most people. But, over time, more and more of the characters will become familiar and slowly it gets easier.
Were I looking at that page for the first time, I’d start by reading through the list of radicals several times. Then I’d start with the first character on the list that’s all hyperlinked, that is, in blue.
The first:
The above definition comes from another dictionary I often use - https://www.mdbg.net - that I really like because it breaks characters down into root words, each of which is translated individually if you click on the character. Also, they list the radical character, which in this case is: 爪 à爫 or zhǎo, that means “claw,” believe it or not, and the number of strokes which is 10. Remember, the root radical is usually on the left, or the top, but sometimes on the bottom. In this case, it’s obviously the top. Once you get even a little familiar with the basic radicals, everything gets a lot easier. Once you know the radicals, sometimes, in some ways, Chinese becomes a phonetic language; that is, you can sometimes put the character unit sounds together into the whole words. But, not in the case of love. Zhao doesn’t sound anything like ài, which sounds like ‘aye’ or ‘eye,’ with a downward tone.
It all becomes familiar over time, and like learning swimming, takes time and patience. Hence the closeness of family in China. Without this time-consuming labor of love, that is, teaching one’s children how to read and write, there would be no strong tradition of family.
For westerners learning to read Chinese, its easiest if you look at the above Chinese character, make a story in your mind to help you remember the parts and how they fit together into a whole - with the overall meaning.
Looking up the radical, as I did above, helps create what I’d call an “anchor” meaning. Perhaps true love is not clinging, like clawing someone close, but in a storm on the slippery deck of a ship, one hangs on to one’s love as if one does have claws.
And so it was in many times and places during the early agrarian age (5,000 to 10,000 years ago in Asia) when the first farms were by riversides that sometimes overflowed and carried the life-giving crops, and even family members away. Again, one clings and claws onto one’s love and risks death to not let them go. There can be deep meaning hidden within characters that bind families together in ways most outsiders can’t imagine.
In China, I think most parents know mnemonics to help their children make associations that greatly facilitate remembering the written characters. Those, I think in most cases, are family secrets.
True, China is a socialist nation, but every parent wants their child to be the best and fastest learner around. China is and always has been a highly competitive place, (due to a long history of a large population) and thus the secrets of optimal learning are often kept within families, just like traditional martial arts always have been up till the past century.
As for this writer? In regards to reading Putonghua Chinese, I’m about at the level of an intellectually challenged four-year-old that suffers from attention deficit disorder (even though I don’t). But I do suffer from too many interests and never having time for that which I probably really should spend a lot more time, and would, if I could figure out how to live without sleeping at all.
As to why I chose Part 44 of this series to explain about good, bad and really bad numbers, and the ABCs of how to read Chinese, that should be easy. First, Part 44 sounds like “double-death,” and who really wants to have an article about them written with “double-death” as part of the title? Not too many Chinese people I know, that’s for sure.
So, I thought, write an article explaining the meanings of numbers, including that rather unlucky number 45 – 1 number, then add a hefty dose of really good karma by explaining some things about how people can learn to read Chinese free, and conclude on the subject of “love,” for a complete Yin/Yang balance on the whole thing, and in the end, we’ll sail through the doorway of double-death smoothly saying “Not today my old friend; not today” (God Willing).
And, can I get an “Amen!” or “Amin!” on that? Thank you! Xièxiè! 谢谢！
