If Chinese written language were the same as Dr. Northrop's description, there would have been absolutely no need of any China study, as China could not have mounted any true and meaningful rising.
Yet, Dr. Northrop was not truly wrong. All native Chinese learns the Chinese written language in the same way as Dr. Northrop's description for over two thousand years. Most of them do not learn it as a knowledge. It is a part of their life, and they learn it by burn-in. Today, the college graduated native Chinese knows about 6,000 Chinese words, about 10% of all Chinese words (60,000). Furthermore, every new word is just as new and as difficult for them the same as the first word they learned. The accumulated knowledge (6,000 total) is of no use because every Chinese word for them is, indeed, solitary, denotative and without any logical whole-part relation, exactly the same as Dr. Northrop's description. For a foreigner to learn Chinese written language in the same way as the native Chinese does, the best that he can be is a second class Chinese, a tag-along.
Furthermore, in an analogy, the nuclear engineering is an application of nuclear physics. Without knowing the detail of nuclear physics, no one can be a true nuclear engineer. In another analogy, steam engine could be invented before the development of Thermodynamics. Yet, without Thermodynamics, the invention of jet engine would be near impossible. The applications (read, write) of Chinese written language can be as the case similar to the invention of steam engine which could be done without the knowing of Thermodynamics. Yet, in order to master Chinese written language truly, one must learn it as a knowledge. However, no comprehensive textbook on Chinese written language as a knowledge was ever written during the past five thousand years. It was treated as foods. One must digest hundreds of books in order to discover the true essence.
This course to Chinese written language is similar to nuclear physics to nuclear engineering and Thermodynamics to the jet engine design. This course will cover all fundamental issues on Chinese written language, many of which were not discussed ever before.
Picking up a bad habit in golfing, it is a killer for the game. The nuclear physics and genetics are two different subjects. There is no reason to mix them up. English is a perceptual language with parts of speech and tenses, etc.. Chinese is a conceptual language without parts of speech, nor tenses. Please see the article The Culture energy of China at http://www.chinese-word-roots.org/cwr018.htm
In short, there is no reason to mix up the English grammar with Chinese language logic. Any teaching of verbs and predicate in Chinese language is, at least, going to catch a bad habit as Chinese words have no parts of speech, nor numbers, nor cases. It is, in fact, flatly wrong. It could even be intentional misleading. In conceptual language, all actions are treated in the conceptual level. That is, there are action describing words but no verbs in terms of grammar. In fact, every word can become an action word in Chinese. Even the word "one" can become an action word, such as, "I one it," which means that "I make it to become one." Of course, a comparison between Chinese language logic and English grammar is the most helpful. As we must teach nuclear physics as nuclear physics and genetics as genetics, we must teach Chinese language as Chinese language, not placing a sheep head on a wolf's body.
| Modules / Leading radicals |
* | 喿 | 爰 | 妻 | # |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 口 | 啜 | 噪 | |||
| 手 or its root form |
掇 | 操 | 援 | 撤 | |
| 水 or its root form |
澡 | 湲 | 淒 | 澈 | |
| 心 | 惙 | 懆 | 愋 | 悽 | |
| ⻞ | 綴 | 緩 | 緀 | ||
| others | 輟 、 棳 、 蝃 … | 燥 、 臊 、 璪 … | 媛 、煖 、 暖 、 諼 … | 棲 、 萋 … | 轍 、 徹 … |
Chinese holidays, cooking and even history are, of course, parts of Chinese culture. Yet, they will not show the Chinese value system and Chinese ways of thinking directly.
Behind every Chinese idiom, there was a story, and that idiom describes the virtue of that story. It uses 4 to 6 words to describe that very complicated story. So, every Chinese idiom encompasses three important dimensions,
In this course, two hundred commonly used Chinese idioms will be described. The original text ( 出 處 ) of those idioms will be provided in the teacher's handbook.
Appendix -- the meaning of word roots in the sample textbook.