1.12 Writing by Hand, Typing, and Looking Up — Epoché
What you will be able to do Write a character inside a square, at the right size and in the right proportions. Type Chinese with a pinyin keyboard, and say why a pinyin keyboard cannot help with a character you cannot read. Find a character you cannot read by three routes: its radical, its total stroke count, and handwriting input. Use the dictionary attached to the text in this library to get the reading of a character in its context. Prerequisites : 1.11, which closed the band of 150 characters. You also want the eight strokes and the five rules of order from 1.2 Characters , and the radical index that 1.3 Characters introduced, because this lesson puts both to work on characters you have never seen. This lesson closes the first part of the Characters volume with the three things you actually do with the writing system: make characters with a pen, produce them on a machine, and find out what an unknown one is. The third is the skill the rest of the course rests on, because from the Grammar volume onward every lesson brings new words, and outside this course almost every page has characters beyond the band of 150. Writing on squared paper Chinese is written inside squares: equal boxes, one character to a box, with no extra space where one word ends and the next begins. Practice paper is a printed grid, sometimes with faint lines through the middle and the diagonals. Three things matter, and all three are about the square rather than the strokes. The character fills the box, since one written small in a corner looks as wrong as a word written half the height of an English line. It is centred, which is what the diagonals are for. And the parts keep their proportions: a component on the left usually compresses, often to a narrow third of the box, as 亻 , 氵 and 讠 do, though some, like 木 in 林 , take nearer half. Every character gets the same box, so the strokes of a sixteen-stroke character are much smaller than those of a two-stroke one. How long to spend on this is a real question, and the answer is: less than you think. Recognising a character, saying it and writing it from memory are three separate skills, and the third is the slowest and least used, because almost all adult writing is typed. This course asks you to write at least the 150 characters of the band by hand. What handwriting buys, beyond the characters themselves, is attention: you cannot write a character without deciding where its parts begin and end, and that is what a radical lookup needs. Typing with a pinyin keyboard Typing Chinese does not involve a Chinese keyboard. You type the pinyin of what you want on the ordinary keyboard in front of you, without tone marks, and the program offers the characters that match; you pick one and carry on. The word for such a program is 输入法 shūrùfǎ , "input method", and every phone and computer has one. One habit makes it usable: type whole words rather than single syllables. One syllable alone gives a long list, while two together usually put the word you meant at the top, because the program is guessing from the pair. Tone marks are not usually typed, and an ordinary input method neither asks for a tone nor corrects one you have learned wrong, so in typing the tones do little work for you. The limitation this lesson is built around is simpler. A pinyin keyboard takes sound and gives characters; it cannot take a character and give its sound. Meet a character you cannot pronounce and the input method is useless. That is why the writing system keeps a second set of indexes, arranged by shape. Six characters you cannot read yet The six sentences below come from the corpus this course draws on, and each contains one word with characters you have not met. You are not expected to read that word; the sentences are here so that the lookup routes have something real to work on. Notice how ordinary the situation is: none of them is difficult, and only the content word is missing. In five of them every character outside that word is one you know ( 鱼 is from lesson 1.7); the sixth also has 需 xū, the first half of 需要 xūyào , to need. Chinese English 树在哪里？ [1] Where is the tree? 这个湖里有很多鱼。 [2] There are lots of fish in this lake. 你喜欢吃蜂蜜吗？ [3] Do you like honey? 我的眼镜在哪里？ [4] Where are my glasses? 我喜欢足球。 [5] I like football. 我们需要买醋。 [6] We need to buy vinegar. The characters Here are the six taken apart the way a radical index needs them. The notes name the radical and count its strokes, then count everything else and give the total, because the two paper routes use different numbers. Character Meaning Radical, the rest, and the total 湖 zh hú lake Radical 氵 water, three strokes. The rest 胡 , nine strokes; twelve in all. 树 zh shù （ 樹 ） tree Radical 木 wood, four strokes. The rest 又 and 寸 , five strokes; nine in all. 蜂 zh fēng bee Radical 虫 insect, six strokes. The right-hand part, seven strokes; thirteen in all. 镜 zh jìng （ 鏡 ） mirror Radical 钅 metal, five strokes. The rest 竟 , eleven strokes; sixteen in all. 球 zh qiú ball Radical 王 jade, four strokes. The rest 求 , seven strokes; eleven in all. 醋 zh cù vinegar Radical 酉 wine vessel, seven strokes. The rest 昔 , eight strokes; fifteen in all. Read the radicals in the notes and notice how much they give you before you know anything else. Water, wood, insect, metal, jade, wine vessel: lake, tree, bee, mirror, ball, vinegar. Four of the six point straight at the meaning, the payoff of lessons 1.3 and 1.4. Metal is not what a modern reader would guess for a mirror, but it is what a mirror was made of when the character was fixed; and jade for a ball records an older sense of the character, a kind of jade. Three ways to find a character you cannot read All three routes end at the same place, a dictionary entry with a reading and a meaning, and none needs the reading to get there. Learn all three: each fails in a different way, and the one that fails is never the one you expected. By its radical Lesson 1.3 gave the procedure; here it is on something harder. Take