I have a book that my wife found for me in a charity shop that is divided, half in Hanzi and half in English.  I sometimes read it to see how much I've improved in my reading (not a lot but I get a sense of it).

Today I noticed the character combination 為什麼 in the book.  I'm learning both Traditional and Simplified at the same time so I did a sort of double take reading this.  My books indicate this should be 為甚麼 wei4shen2me.

Is this an accepted shortening for shen2 or is in some traditional texts and if so why.  (I'd rather shorten the "me"). Or am I reading this completely wrong and it does not say why but something else instead!

Trevor

Hi..

I have now just started to write Hanzi on a daily basis. I am using the Hanzi Helper program made by a poddie, his name starts with "col" but I can't remember the other 3 letetrs in his username right now. Anyway, the point of this post is to ask a really basic question: How can I tell which direction the stroke shoulod be written.

I can use the Animated GIF website to show me the stroke order but I am wanting to be sure I am also making the strokes in the correct direction as well, as I am sure this will aid me later on. When I look at a character that is using a decently rendered font, I can see there is a thin end and a fat end of each stroke.

I am assuming that the fat end is the end of the stroke and the thin end is the start of the stroke, only because if I was using a brush, I would end up with a fat end at the end of a stroke; or if I was doing one of those tiny strokes, I would end up with a tapered stroke with the tip of the brush pointing towards the thin end of the stroke.

Just really wanted to confirm that I had this correct.

I'm trying to do 10 to 14 characters a day, writing them out 10 times each. Not using any context at this point because I am just really getting used to writing. Next month a new book will be released called "Remembering The Hanzi Book 1", so when I get that I will take more of a structured approach to Hanzi learning.

I just found this interesting analogy to explain the Chinese writing system:
If English was written like Chinese

Definately has some entertaining value.

Hey all!

JohnP (creator of Sinosplice and host on ChinesePOD) mentioned this site a little while ago in one of his blog posts. It is a great site that I have been using over the last week to learn, practise and reinforce my Chinese character skills.

It is currently in the beta stages of development, which also means that it is currently free to use!! :) You can try it out without creating an account but if you do create an account, you can select your vocab list to learn from and also track your progress on a daily basis.

I could try to explain how easy it is to use and do an indepth review of the site but it's easier just for you to go and check it out yourselves. Trust me.. it's really, really good for all levels of learning. The vocab list I am using at the moment is called "integrated chinese", which is all commonly used characters and words. It also has the HSK Level 1 vocab list loaded on there as well.

A good thing about it is that it also allows you to learn the tones for the characters at the same time, and you can even listen to samples of how each character is spoken. I hope that one day ChinesePOD will incorporate a tool like this into their own site. Until then however...

http://www.skritter.com/

Click the image for a larger picture.

Fellow CPODers,

I love CPOD, unfortunately, there isn't a lot for learning how to write characters. This is the only area CPOD lacks, everything else is great. So I ask to those who do take time to learn how to write characters, what resources do you use? Books? Just writing a character hundreds of times? All advice is welcomed.

你们的朋友，

kevin_zhong

Yesterday evening my (Chinese) collegue and I discussed what would happen if China in fact abondoned 汉字 and switched to Pinyin only.

We agreed that Pinyin is virtually unreadable - pure pain, due to all the ambiguities and homophones. But would this in fact foster a slow change of the language? At least the written language can be expected to be altered - more multi syllable words, more redundancy, more words with distinct pronounciation.

And would this also feed through into the spoken language? Or vice versa: Does Chinese have so many homophones because of its semantically rich characters? Changye's posts on the development of tones and sounds seem to support this hypothesis (e.g. sounds that fell together over time, tones that vanished - all more widespread in Mandarin than in dialects that are primarily passed down in spoken form).

My collegue made a good point - if this would be true, you should be able to observe similar effects in Japanese, as Japan has already left pure 汉字 behind by introducing hiragana and katagana. Did this have an impact on the language?

Any linguist out there who knows more?

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/chinese-language-ever-evolving/

Cut and paste the above link from the NYTimes about the on going debate about the future of Chinese written script.

My chinese writing and reading skills are not that great yet but watching an old martial arts film the other night I started to wonder about the direction of the writing.

On CPod and places like XinHua the writing is all done left to right.  Is this always the case or does it vary and if it varies are you just expected to work it out or is there some clue?

Suggestions please as to which are the best websites for finding and copying and pasting Chinese characters? Thanks

I mean, you obviously don't need them to communicate, since they're not present in speech, which is still readily understood. The Chinese themselves can hardly write them anymore. No, they write in Latin characters and have them converted to hanzi by a computer. The Chinese government's relentless promotion of Standard Mandarin has eradicated the need to use hanzi as a bridge between dialects. So what good are they? Do they serve any purpose anymore?

'Cause if they don't, well, like them as we might, chances are they'll disappear. That's just how things work. They're too much of a hassle to keep around if they don't actually do anything besides look pretty.

Everybody is already writing in pinyin. All it takes is for some kids to start skipping the conversion to hazi in online chatrooms and then a provocative young writer will publish a book in pinyin and then we're off to the races.

I just got this great book by Allison & Laurence Matthews, "Learning Chinese Characters."  It helps you learn/memorize the first 800 characters you need to get through HSK level A.  It uses mnemonic stories to help you remember the characters.  I'm through three chapters, about 40 characters, I am doing better remembering than I thought possible.  It is published by Tuttle and cost $20 from Amazon.

I wish I had it a year ago.