Fuddland

Here’s a quick tip on how to impress the Chinese with your knowledge of their language: learn how to write the character for die [as in the singular of dice]. Some of the classroom activities I like to do involve use of a die to introduce an element of excitement into the lesson [this sounds sarcastic but believe me, telling a group that the next person to roll a 6 has to give a one-minute talk, then watching as the tension mounts on each throw is quite amusing].

Invariably someone will point at the die and ask what it’s called in English, and I have now learnt to lean back and wait for them to make a note of it, because when they come to writing down the Chinese word, it suddenly occurs to them that they have no idea how to. They know how to pronounce it all right, “shǎizi”, so whispers go around the group, but generally, hardly ever is there someone in the group who knows how to write it.

Now before we all leap on our herd of high horses and moan about how difficult the Chinese language must be if the native speakers can’t even remember how to write it, there are currently over ten million pages indexed by Google that say “calender” not “calendar”, to cite just one of the 100 most commonly misspelled words.

So you might imagine that the character for die is one of the more complex ones, but in fact the “shǎi” contains only 14 strokes of the pen, the “zi” only 3, and its overall appearance is “modular” enough to make it quite easy to break down and memorise. So here it is: 骰子. I really don’t have any insights as to why it’s so hard to remember, beyond the explanation I generally get from students: “Oh, we don’t like to gamble.” Learn to write it and amaze your Chinese friends—at least until they challenge you to write anything else.

[Aside: the most stroke-laden characters I can find are 龘 [tà] and 齉 [nàng], both of which are made up of 36 individual strokes. The former means, “the appearance of a dragon walking”, and the latter means, “to speak with a nasal twang”.]

#1

srh | 2009 / 03 / 18 – 17:46

You made up that onomatopoeic meaning of ‘nang’ didn’t you…?

#2

David | 2009 / 03 / 18 – 18:52

Nope, it’s in the dictionary. :P

#3

babsy | 2009 / 04 / 18 – 17:58

as a chinese I never learn the “appearance of a dragon walking” word before. I am curious, this hieroglyphic word compose of 3 dragon characters: one on top and 2 underneath. How does this word resemble a walking dragon?
could the dragons ever hangout alone?LOL

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