Reading Chinese

Before the sun set on December, I ran into a retail store manager and two luxury car salesmen who were shopping for their first books on Mandarin Chinese. I’m sure these aren’t the only cases where studying the language is a new year’s resolution for 2015.

Know what I think? I think that no matter what year it is, this topic isn’t going to go away. So I’ll offer yet another worm’s-eye-view of my experience with the gig. Today I’ll note four resources that I found useful for studying written vocabulary in Mandarin. Of course, written vocabulary is just one slice of the linguistic pizza, but that’s what’s on the menu today.

And as for who is serving it, well, I am just a so-so student of Chinese. I punted my fourth semester before the first class because my first look at the grammar-intensive textbook gave me nausea, insomnia, acid-reflux, and a headache all at the same time, and I’m not entirely ruling out incontinence, either. It’s been a haphazard path of delinquent-style self-study ever since. So, while I can share my experiences, I am not qualified to give any advice. If I ever gave anyone advice in Chinese, they should probably do the opposite.

Anyway, of these four resources, one is free on the Web. Three are inexpensive books at under $20 each if you shop around. I’m just going to hit some highlights so I can squeeze everything in here.

Let’s start at the free end of the spectrum. Professor Jun Da of Middle Tennessee State University (in Murfreesboro, Tenn.) has compiled lists of the most commonly used Chinese characters. They’re posted on the Web. You can find the page via this URL: lingua.mtsu.edu.

There are, of course, other lists out there, and even Professor Da has more than one list. Professor Da’s “Character frequency list of Modern Chinese” (that’s how it’s listed on the website) is what I downloaded. I make various study sheets from this information. It’s a gold mine.

The characters are listed in descending order of frequency. This enables the student to pick the lowest-hanging fruit first.

Professor Da’s information also provides succinct definitions for each character. This enables the reader to look up the character in more detailed resources. That’s where the fun starts. And now we come to the three books I want to mention.

One book focuses entirely on the most common 500 characters. As for the title, we run into a vast ocean of words here, so let’s dive in:

The old edition of this book, which is what I have, is called the Chinese-English Dictionary of the 500 Most Frequently Used Words: A Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese. The author is Yong Ho. The updated version of the book (same author) is titled Concise Chinese-English Usage Dictionary: A Study Reference to the 500 Most Essential Mandarin Characters.

Got that? Good. Anyway, I’ll note that the term “dictionary” doesn’t do the book justice. It’s more than a mere dictionary. It is a rich source of information that shows how the common characters snap together, Lego-style, to make various words. The other books I’m mentioning also do that, but this fleshes the words out a bit more and has sample sentences.

Moving up in the character count, I’ll mention a book called Learning Chinese Characters, by Alison Matthews and Laurence Matthews. It covers 800 common characters and 1,033 words derived from them.

Incidentally, those particular characters came from what is now an old version of a standardized test of Chinese (called the “HSK” which are Mandarin’s phonetic initials for Chinese Level Test). But even though the test changed a few years ago, the language hasn’t, and the book remains, for me at least, highly useful. It dissects the characters in great detail and explains them better than any other book I’ve seen.

The book also incorporates quirky little fairy tales to facilitate memorization, but I haven’t paid much attention to this feature so I can’t say anything about it.

Going beyond the most basic of basics, I will mention a book that’s deeper in scale. This is called Reading and Writing Chinese: Third Edition. It was written by William McNaughton and revised by Jiageng Fan. It covers 2,633 characters and over 5,000 related words, and, incidentally, this material dovetails with what’s on the new version of the HSK.

The only reason I mention the HSK is that the term is widely used in this realm, so we might as well know what it refers to.

Overall, whether it’s a symptom of my slow progress, the nature of the language, or maybe a combination of both things, I have found that I keep coming back to the basics. These four resources help me do just that, and by combining their various strengths, I’ve gotten a lot of use from them.

Beyond tending the basics, my only resolution on this note is not to have any resolutions, or any expectations, or any goals. Hey, I’ve finally found a resolution that I can keep!