Han Yu

This is a leaf from my Chinese class notes. Evidently the way I prefer to drive the characters into my memory is through repetition. A few of my favourite characters:

dì
The labyrinthine squiggle with the vertical line through it and the two little people or birds perched on top, and which is used to identify ordinal numbers. As I found out two or three days ago, "ordinal numbers" means, logically enough, numbers that signify an order. So dì yi kè means "first lesson," whereas yi kè would just mean "one lesson." [The yi should have a bar over the i, but I don't know the html code for that.]

kè
Looks like an "i" with a spiky scarecrow standing to its right. It means "lesson," and as such this piece of vocabulary has been of great utility so far.

hao
To me it looks like two happy people dancing. It means "good" (wherefore the common greeting Ni hao literally means "you good") and is supposed to have an upside-down circumflex over the "a."

shì
Be. It is an oddly Egyptian-looking character, and vaguely resembles a box on a chair with one straight and one baroquely curling leg.

hen
It's supposed to have an upside-down circumflex over the "e," and means "very." For instance, hen hao means "very good." To me it looks like a person walking away from a fir tree, and I remember the meaning by imagining that the tree boughs are being swayed by a very strong wind.

qi
Stand. The way I remember the character is that it looks like an odd chair (with a cross on top and a curly leg) on whose tip a squiggle (possibly a seahorse) is standing. There should be an upside-down circumflex on the "i." Duì bù qi means "I'm sorry," but literally the words signify "I cannot stand before you (i.e. out of shame)."

At any rate, I like most of the other characters, too. As for "qi," "hen," etc., I've written them here in pinyin (pronounced "pin-ing," the "y" being the way for writing "i" at the beginning of a syllable). Pinyin is a mode of representing Chinese characters phonetically, using the Latin alphabet, which not only students of Chinese but also native speakers use to navigate their alphabet of ca. 30,000 characters. It isn't infallible, because as my teacher said yesterday, she once checked the chart that gives all the possible combinations of vowels and consonants in pinyin, and it only offers ca. 241 possibilities, which of course represents an infinitesimal fraction of the entire syllabary (if that's the correct term).

The accents in pinyin indicate whether the pitch of one's voice should be raised or lowered, or both in succession, or not at all. Theoretically it may be difficult to grasp this concept, and when I was learning ancient Greek I refused to attempt it (not that we were expected to do so), but I've realized that we change the pitch of our voices all the time anyway. At the end of a question, if you compare the beginning and end of the last syllable, you do hear that the voice becomes higher.

Admittedly I've found the pronunciation of Chinese quite difficult. The pinyin "j" sounds, to my ears, an awful lot like a hard "d," only that the "d" is followed by a kind of buzzing "z." "Zh" is apparently far more analogous to the English "j." "Q" and "x" are also weird for me, because "ch" is "ch" and "sh" is "sh," whereas "q" and "x" are respectively something subtly different which involves considerable stretching of the corners of the mouth. "E" is an enigma, and at present it seems to me like a vague approximation of "eu-eh" as that would be pronounced in French; I've decided to pronounce "eng" as if it were French, too, because it sounds a good deal like "ong" but isn't. Anyway, my approach to the pronunciation of unknown languages is to hit on a reasonably euphonious compromise between the languages I know and the one I don't, instead of running the risk of perpetrating a grotesque caricature that would induce trauma in a native speaker. That is why I do not experiment with Spanish "r"s in public.