Explain radicals more

content/posts/finally-learning-汉字.md

@@ -14,11 +14,11 @@ Some background about myself: I was born and live in the US, but both my parents
 
 People sometimes describe Chinese characters as fancy pictograms, which is a load of absolute nonsense when you think about it, but isn't totally wrong. For instance, 一 means one, 日 means sun, 山 means mountain, and so on. Obviously, you can't represent anything except the basics with pictograms, so that won't work for a full-blown writing system.
 
-We can get a lot more mileage out of this system by representing words that sound similar with the same character, since Chinese has a lot of homophones and near-homophones. However, then we'll get really confused, since we won't know what word this character is supposed to mean. We can disambiguate by adding a second component to the character, a *semantic* component (also called a radical) in addition to the *phonetic* component. For instance, 青 (qīng) means blue-green, 请 (qǐng) means to ask, 清 (qīng) means clear, and 情 (qíng) means emotion.
+We can get a lot more mileage out of this system by representing words that sound similar with the same character, since Chinese has a lot of homophones and near-homophones. However, then we'll get really confused, since we won't know what word this character is supposed to mean. We can disambiguate by adding a second component to the character, a *semantic* component (also called a radical) in addition to the *phonetic* component. For instance, 青 (qīng) means blue-green, 请 (qǐng) means to ask (this radical means the word has to do with talking), 清 (qīng) means clear (this radical means the word has to do with water), and 情 (qíng) means emotion (this radical means the word has to do with emotions).
 
 Yay! This shouldn't be too hard to learn, right? There are only around 400 different syllables in Mandarin, not counting tones, so that's around 400 different phonetic characters to learn, and then I can guess the meaning and which word it corresponds to based on the radical. Easy!
 
-Not so fast. Most characters were created thousands of years ago, so the phonetics have all shifted and jumbled around over the years while the characters have stayed more or less the same (Yes, simplification is a thing, but it just made the shapes simpler instead of updating them to reflect modern Mandarin phonology). Consider 猜, which you would expect to be pronounced like qing or similar, but nope it's actually cāi. However, in old Chinese, 青 and 猜 were pronounced [s.r̥]ˤeŋ and sʰlɯː respectively, and although I don't know IPA, but I'm guessing they sound similar.
+Not so fast. Most characters were created thousands of years ago, so the phonetics have all shifted and jumbled around over the years while the characters have stayed more or less the same (Yes, simplification is a thing, but it just made the shapes simpler instead of updating them to reflect modern Mandarin phonology). Consider 猜, which you would expect to be pronounced like qing or similar, but nope it's actually cāi. Bonus misery: the radical means the word has to do with animals, which is related to its archaic definition, but definitions have changed over thousands of years too. However, in old Chinese, 青 and 猜 were pronounced [s.r̥]ˤeŋ and sʰlɯː respectively, and although I don't know IPA, I'm guessing they sound similar.
 
 So yeah. Learning 汉字 is like learning a very convoluted representation of old Chinese phonology, that somehow corresponds to modern Mandarin words. Instead of being able to recognize 400 characters, you need to know at least 2000 to be able to read most stuff. Even if you know the 400 most common characters, most sentences contain uncommon characters (like how most English sentences contain uncommon words, or you're just going to be talking about boring stuff all the time), and they're usually important, so you'll have no idea what the sentence means. Fun.