On the demons that haunt the Hanzismatter netherworld
If you sample the pleasures of Hanzismatter, it’s hard not to hit the subscribe button. Once subscribed, the rewards are plentiful. The posting rate is leisurely, one every week or two, and the content is always nectar for the bee in your schadenfreude bonnet. Mostly it’s the muscleheads and exoticists who end up with “ugly boy” on their biceps or “sacrificial grasshopper” on their bums. Sometimes, even more sweetly, it’s the academic journal whose front cover sample of classical Chinese turns out to be a brothel advertisement, or the book about “Chinese symbols” that has one upside-down on its cover.
At the same time you have a nagging suspicion that, for a Zhonglish speaker and student of Hanzi, Hanzismatter is a guilty pleasure leading you to dark places you’d be better off not knowing about. On the one hand it couldn’t be that scary: it’s a mere taste, a dip in the pond — enervating, practically, like a small-but-salubrious dose of radiation or cigarette smoke. You’re not sure it’s even wicked, really. After all, what is Hell but Heaven misunderstood?
The Beijing Sounds studios hope to use this Halloween as an opportunity to frighten you out of this complacency. Today, based on scientific examination and extensive documentation* of the Hanzismatter phenomenon, along with liberal use of joss sticks and seers, the staff is proud to present:
Denizens of Hanzismatter
|
Level
|
Name
|
Description |
Sample Residents |
1
|
Exotic Others
|
The visitor to this level (who is neither student nor Zhonglish speaker) encounters mystifying curls, sharp hooks, forceful strokes and gentle swabs — but nothing resembling language. Typical comment: “Oh, you can write stuff with this?” For details, see Hanzismatter |
See Hanzismatter |
2
|
Shadow players
|
On this level the student encounters, as if in a dream induced by an anodyne, a dizzying conflation and reseparation of characters that have almost nothing in common except a general overall shape.Students often realize they’ve reached this level in a moment of clarity that parallels the classic mourning process:
- Shock — “this doesn’t make any sense at all”
- Denial — “huh, did the dictionary get the wrong pronunciation?”
- Bargaining — “Okay, okay, I guess they are different, so I’m gonna remember that the component on the bottom is different — but that top stuff is all about the same” (leads directly to Level 4, below)
- Guilt — “I am the world’s worst Hanzi student; clearly I just don’t care [sob]“
- Anger — @!丫#刁*^虲
- Depression — “I will never, never, never, never, never…”
- Resignation — “Put them both in Anki and get on with it”
- Acceptance — “It’s fun to decipher and differentiate. Really. Soy Feliz.”
|
盖，善
绊，详
捞，伤 |
3
|
Personal Devils
|
In certain ways the specters of this level should be more frightening than the shadow players, because they are pairs of characters that are connected by only the thinnest threads — a misplaced component here, a vowel sound there. Yet the student is comforted at the thought that, somehow, in some way, neural pathways are connecting in ways that will eventually sort themselves out. |
Idiosyncratic by definition, e.g. in this writer’s case:
棍，谐
臭，厚 |
4
|
One-dimensional warlocks
|
These spooks promote the confusion of two characters that are really not much alike except insofar as they locate one component part in the same place, e.g. the bottom-right 力 found in the example at the right. In the student’s defense, the remaining components often have vaguely the same shape.At this level it is fair to say that the student has only just begun to pay attention to character components. |
掌，拿
择，棒 |
5
|
Decorative doppelgangers
|
Those who don’t know their devils would treat the Decorative Doppelgangers as just a variation on the warlocks of Level 4, but the most frightening aspect of the DDs is that the student feels progress has been made. “After all, I correctly matched the pattern on the vast majority of the real estate. All these details are overrated, anyway: three-drop water, two drop water — whatever.” |
除，涂 |
6
|
Semantic polygamists
|
Closely related to the DDs above, the Semantic Polygamists marry the same phonetic to another component to form a “different” word or morpheme whose meaning is sometimes so close that you wonder what sadist thought of differentiating them in the first place. |
荒，慌 |
7
|
Phonetic Phantoms
|
Sneaky phonetic component (dis)similarities, especially when one (e.g. 亡 in example on right) is a pretty useful and productive phonetic component but the other has nothing to do with it. |
汇，亡 |
8
|
The truly wicked
|
To achieve this level of infamy, two characters must not only differ by just a single flick of the seemingly errant finger, they must also occur in print at roughly the same frequency. For example, although an earlier post accused 日 and 曰 of falling into this “minimal pair” category, the studio staff decided, on the basis of reader input, that it actually didn’t qualify precisely because 曰 was such a rare character and 日 so common.
The student at this level is tempted to give up on isolated encounters entirely, “If only I could always see the characters in context, surely I wouldn’t be this confused.” After all, each of the truly wicked is more than likely to be part of a two-character word in the context of a larger sentence. Why not just forget about learning them in isolation?
The truth is, though, that relying on context always comes back to haunt you, somehow. Sure, there’s safety in numbers, but inevitably, as byway leads on to byway, eventually you find yourself off the main thoroughfare, away from the crowds, during the witching hour. It’s a twisted street in an unfamiliar hútòngr (胡同儿 = neighborhood), dimly lit by only the blue sign of a massage parlor menu offering theirs “European style”. You’re badly in need of directions but not sure who you dare to approach. The character lingering out front looks oddly familiar, yet not altogether friendly. You decide to greet him by name… |
奏，秦
拨，拔
衣，农
己，已 |
The depths of Hanzismatter: how far do you dare to go this Halloween?
NB: posting a few days early so you can get your costume ready. If you prefer buffoonish to scary, you could always dress up as Biang.
* Granted, the sample size of one, studio director syz’s personal Anki flashcard collection, might be questioned by the mathematically challenged. But rest assured, dear readers, that the relevant departments are working hard to ensure accurate and rapid scientific development.
Doesn’t this seem to parallel the 2nd, 4th and 5th levels of Hanzi Hell? If you buy the analogy of learning Hanzi as “texture discrimination”, the money quote from today’s Language Log post is:
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