Let's continue... We are still looking at the things that we should pay attention to in Pleco, while we are translating words from English to Mandarin.
Last post, we were looking at all the things under the DICT tab.
In this post, we are going to look at the other tabs, that include CHARS, WORDS and SENTS tabs.
Today, try to key in "dog" in the search box. You will get the following screen, then you can implement what you have grabbed from the previous post on the DICT tab.
Ask yourselves the following questions:
1. Do you see the Chinese character for dog?
2. Can you pronounce it? Just simply follow the sound when you press on the speaker.
3. Do you see the sample given? Although this example is showing you how people use it in an offensive manner, just keep it for your knowledge and not to use it when not necessary.
4. There is a new thing here, please look at the image above, under CC. you see the abbreviation M in bold? That refers to the measuring words for dog. In English we say "a dog", "an apple", "a bowl of soup" , in Bahasa Indonesia, we say "seekor anjing", "sebuah apel", "semangkuk sup". In Chinese, we can use either "zhi" or "tiao" to measure the numbers of dog. "Yi zhi gou" means one dog/a dog. So that's something new under DICT tab.
Moving forward, lets click on CHARS tab.
There are 2 drop down menus that say: "Radical" and "Component".
a. Radical
Radical is defined as the fundamental nature/root of something, in this case, the Chinese Character for "gou", dog. Most radicals are rooted from another character in Chinese. For dog it comes from this 犬, quan, which in Chinese it is another character that has the same meaning, dog.
In some cases, as this one, we do not write the radical exactly the same as the root word "犬", instead the form changes to the shape as you see in the circled part below.
Many other words has the same radical, such as, cat, monkey, lion, and many other animals. You can try to Pleco it later!
Please note that, there are radicals that when written in another chracacters, keep their original shape. For example, 灯 (deng) lamp. Its radical is 火. Do you that it keeps the original shape in the character 灯?
b. Component
Components refer to the parts of character. In Mandarin, there are some Chinese characters that are simple and stand on their own to form their own meaning （E.g. 人，手，一，十）and there are those which are more complex characters where they are formed by a few basic characters. For dog, it consists of 2 parts, the radical that we have seen before, and another character 句, when it stands on its own means "sentence".
The radical in a characters most of the time could help us guess what that particular character is trying to define or what the character relates to.
Here are the examples of radicals that shows the meaning of a word/character.
言 (yan) means speech. Some of the words that are formed using it as radical are; 语 (yu) language， 话 (hua) speech，说 (shuo) say，讲 (jiang) say，讯 (xun) ask, etc. As you can see most of them are related to "speech".
火 (huo) means fire。灯 (deng) lamp，烟 (yan) smoke，烧 (shao) hot/burn，煤 (mei) charcoal.
See how the Chinese characters are formed? I will show you the many structures （结构）of a Chinese characters in a later stage.
So, when people say Chinese characters are not easy to write, I say "indeed it is difficult." However to make it easier, please try to break it down to small parts, extract the components out, it will be much easier that way, best it helps you to identify the meaning of the characters too.
Thus, basic is important. Normally, for a beginner, we will be exposed to easy characters, that has only 1 component in it, and from there, it grows to the more complex characters.
That's pretty much about CHARS tab. Moving on...
WORDS Tab
As you might have already figured out. Those are the common phrases where we can find the word 狗 (gou). It is divided into 2;
a. Words beginning where the 狗 is in the beginning of each phrases
b. Words containing where the 狗 can be found other than the beginning of the phrases. It can be in the middle, the third place, the fourth, and so on or at the end of the phrases.
Skim through it, see if any vocab may be useful for you. This is how we enrich our vocabularies, read more!
SENTS Tab
Under this tab it shows us the usage of word "dog" in the sentence. From the sample sentences, you will learn that word "狗" can have various meaning, not only "dog" as in human's best friend.
Happy Learning,
Linda Tan
Last post, we were looking at all the things under the DICT tab.
In this post, we are going to look at the other tabs, that include CHARS, WORDS and SENTS tabs.
Today, try to key in "dog" in the search box. You will get the following screen, then you can implement what you have grabbed from the previous post on the DICT tab.
1. Do you see the Chinese character for dog?
2. Can you pronounce it? Just simply follow the sound when you press on the speaker.
3. Do you see the sample given? Although this example is showing you how people use it in an offensive manner, just keep it for your knowledge and not to use it when not necessary.
4. There is a new thing here, please look at the image above, under CC. you see the abbreviation M in bold? That refers to the measuring words for dog. In English we say "a dog", "an apple", "a bowl of soup" , in Bahasa Indonesia, we say "seekor anjing", "sebuah apel", "semangkuk sup". In Chinese, we can use either "zhi" or "tiao" to measure the numbers of dog. "Yi zhi gou" means one dog/a dog. So that's something new under DICT tab.
Moving forward, lets click on CHARS tab.
There are 2 drop down menus that say: "Radical" and "Component".
a. Radical
Radical is defined as the fundamental nature/root of something, in this case, the Chinese Character for "gou", dog. Most radicals are rooted from another character in Chinese. For dog it comes from this 犬, quan, which in Chinese it is another character that has the same meaning, dog.
In some cases, as this one, we do not write the radical exactly the same as the root word "犬", instead the form changes to the shape as you see in the circled part below.
Please note that, there are radicals that when written in another chracacters, keep their original shape. For example, 灯 (deng) lamp. Its radical is 火. Do you that it keeps the original shape in the character 灯?
b. Component
Components refer to the parts of character. In Mandarin, there are some Chinese characters that are simple and stand on their own to form their own meaning （E.g. 人，手，一，十）and there are those which are more complex characters where they are formed by a few basic characters. For dog, it consists of 2 parts, the radical that we have seen before, and another character 句, when it stands on its own means "sentence".
The radical in a characters most of the time could help us guess what that particular character is trying to define or what the character relates to.
Here are the examples of radicals that shows the meaning of a word/character.
言 (yan) means speech. Some of the words that are formed using it as radical are; 语 (yu) language， 话 (hua) speech，说 (shuo) say，讲 (jiang) say，讯 (xun) ask, etc. As you can see most of them are related to "speech".
火 (huo) means fire。灯 (deng) lamp，烟 (yan) smoke，烧 (shao) hot/burn，煤 (mei) charcoal.
See how the Chinese characters are formed? I will show you the many structures （结构）of a Chinese characters in a later stage.
So, when people say Chinese characters are not easy to write, I say "indeed it is difficult." However to make it easier, please try to break it down to small parts, extract the components out, it will be much easier that way, best it helps you to identify the meaning of the characters too.
Thus, basic is important. Normally, for a beginner, we will be exposed to easy characters, that has only 1 component in it, and from there, it grows to the more complex characters.
That's pretty much about CHARS tab. Moving on...
WORDS Tab
As you might have already figured out. Those are the common phrases where we can find the word 狗 (gou). It is divided into 2;
a. Words beginning where the 狗 is in the beginning of each phrases
b. Words containing where the 狗 can be found other than the beginning of the phrases. It can be in the middle, the third place, the fourth, and so on or at the end of the phrases.
Skim through it, see if any vocab may be useful for you. This is how we enrich our vocabularies, read more!
SENTS Tab
Under this tab it shows us the usage of word "dog" in the sentence. From the sample sentences, you will learn that word "狗" can have various meaning, not only "dog" as in human's best friend.
So, basically these are the things that you have to know about Pleco when you are translating English words to Mandarin. I hope you find this useful.
The next post will be brief post about translating Mandarin to English on Pleco.
Happy Learning,
Linda Tan
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ReplyDeleteThank you for this post, very interesting. You might also like to consider Chinese Character for Listening
ReplyDelete