The Reading Exercises are presented twice: first in simplified characters in horizontal format, and then again in traditional characters in vertical format.4 This is done to provide learners with practice in reading both types of characters and both formats. Of course, learners may choose to read only one version of the Reading Exercises, or they may read one version first and the other version several months later.
The Reading Exercises for Units 1 to 10 consist of the following components:
1. Sentences. These illustrate the use of the new characters and words in context. There are always ten sentences in this section, and they exemplify all the new characters and most of the new words of the lesson.
2. Conversations. The conversations are in spoken style. The name or role of each person speaking is included and should be studied along with the conversation itself. During class or practice sessions, you should find a partner or partners, and each of you should take a role. Then switch roles, so you get practice reading all of the lines.
3. Character Differentiation Drills. In the same way that drills can be useful for teaching spoken language, they can also help teach written language. The purpose of the character differentiation drills is to give you practice in differentiating “look-alike” characters that learners new to Chinese might confuse. Pronounce each drill out loud and think of the meaning of the character you’re pronouncing.
4. Narratives. The purpose of the narratives is to give you practice in reading connected prose, which is different in a number of ways from a series of independent sentences. A few of the narratives include some elements of written-style Chinese. The first time you read a narrative, you should read it out loud; the second time, read silently and try gradually to increase your reading speed. Always think of the meaning of what you’re reading.
5. Notes. These are miscellaneous comments to help you understand the meaning, structure, and cultural background of the material in the Reading Exercises. No attempt is made to provide systematic treatment of grammar, since that is provided in Basic Spoken Chinese.
Some of the lessons include additional sections on special topics such as numbers, personal and place names, money, times, and dates. There are also a total of 18 supplements presenting examples of popular culture and realia ranging from tongue twisters and riddles to tables and handwritten notes.
Footnotes
1. The two introductory units take up numbers, personal names, and place names and are designed to familiarize learners with the basic strokes of characters while they (in many cases) are learning pronunciation and romanization from Basic Spoken Chinese. One advantage of numbers and names, besides their obvious utility, is that they can occur by themselves and require no grammatical knowledge to be understood.
2. On the rare occasions when there were no appropriate characters in the Basic Conversation of the corresponding lesson, characters from the Supplementary Vocabulary of the corresponding lesson were chosen, or characters from previous lessons where there had been an excess of appropriate characters.
3. Be aware that, when reading characters out loud, Chinese readers have a tendency to give syllables their full tone, so that some syllables that are neutral tone in conversation are pronounced with a full tone instead (e.g., 朋友 “friend” may be read off as péngyŏu instead of péngyou). Our advice in such cases is to follow the pronunciation of your teacher, mentor, or the audio recording that accompanies this text.
4. The main exception to this is Unit A, which is exactly the same in simplified and traditional characters; therefore, it is presented only once, in horizontal format. Although in this book simplified characters are presented in horizontal format and traditional characters are usually presented in vertical format, which reflects general practice in the Chinese “real world,” learners should be aware that simplified characters can also be printed or handwritten in vertical format, and traditional characters can also be (and not infrequently are) printed or handwritten in horizontal format.
An Overview of the Chinese Writing System
Most people equate the Chinese writing system with Chinese characters. Characters are certainly the most prominent feature of written Chinese, but the Chinese writing system actually consists of a whole lot more. In addition to simplified characters, traditional characters, and unofficial but often encountered alternate characters, the Chinese writing system also includes the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet (as in X光 “X-ray,” B型肝炎 “Hepatitis B,” 卡拉OK “Karaoke,” and e世代 “digital generation”); the Pinyin romanization system (for computer entry or to indicate the pronunciations of rare characters); the Arabic numbers plus the Chinese symbol 〇; mathematical symbols such as +–× ÷ = and %; the Chinese currency sign ¥; the reduplication sign 々; punctuation; use of smaller characters for humility; and spacing conventions. Of course, as an educated reader and writer of English, you already know some of the preceding, so not everything will be new for you.
Chinese characters are variously termed “ideograms,” “ideographs,” “logographs,” or “graphs.” In this book, we shall simply call them “Chinese characters” or just “characters.” It’s important to keep in mind that, as is true of all languages, in Chinese speech is primary, the standard Chinese writing system of today essentially being a set of written symbols for recording Chinese speech; Chinese characters certainly do not, as claimed by some, constitute a “language-independent system of logical symbols.” It’s best to think of a Chinese character as standing for a meaningful syllable of a spoken word, a little as if in English we had one symbol for “auto,” another for “bio,” and yet another for “graph,” so that we could then put them together in different combinations like “autograph,” “biography,” and “autobiographer.”
ORIGIN OF THE CHARACTERS
Until quite recently, Chinese children were taught in school that the Chinese characters were the invention of one man, Cang Jie, an official in the court of the Yellow Emperor around 2600 BCE. According to one version of this legend, Cang Jie got the idea for characters from the tracks which he saw birds and other animals make in the ground. However, scholars today agree that Chinese characters are not the invention of any one person but are rather the cumulative product of many individuals over a long period of time. The characters are quite clearly pictographic in origin. The prototypes for the characters are simple drawings of animals and other natural objects which can be found etched on fragments of ancient pottery dating back to before 2000 BCE. Recently, there have been reports of thousands of pictorial symbols dating back even earlier that have been found carved on cliff faces in northwest China.
The earliest examples of fully developed Chinese writing we have today are the so-called 甲骨文 Jiăgŭwén or oracle bone inscriptions, dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300 BCE). To divine the future for the Shang rulers, priests would hold ox collar bones and tortoise shells over a fire until they developed cracks and then interpret the meanings of the cracks, making predictions about weather, religion, politics, and war. The interpretations and predictions would then be recorded on the bones and shells in a few lines of text written in the characters of the day (see the photos on this page and page 15). Over 100,000 pieces of Jiăgŭwén are extant, containing over 3,000 different characters, roughly half of which can be read today.
The story of the discovery of the Jiăgŭwén is a colorful chapter in the history of Chinese paleography. The oracle bones, which had been discovered in the vicinity of Anyang, Henan, had for some time been regarded as “dragon bones” and had been sold and ground up for Chinese medicine in pharmacies in the Beijing area. In 1899, a scholar by the name of Wang Yirong, who was taking the dragon bones for malaria, examined the characters on the bones and started researching them with his friend Liu E. They concluded that the inscriptions on