Helpful resources for understanding words in combination?

[raydpratt]

I am no where near fluent enough to be struggling with the problem, but the lack of character groupings for multi-character words is obviously difficult for a westerner. However, I see that pinyin is often written in groupings of syllables to create multi-syllable words. I assume that learning these multi-syllable words as character combinations is just another part of becoming fluent in Chinese, and I think that I will search for learning materials that will give me the pinyin in groups for individual words.

Western writing conventions have already influenced written Chinese by adding punctuation marks to sentences written with Chinese characters, and I suppose that we could hope that individual words and multi-syllable words could be separated by spaces to make it easier to recognise and look up single and multi-syllable words. However, one of the charms of written Chinese is that it requires fewer lines and pages than materials written in English (just as English requires fewer lines and pages than materials written in Spanish). I even suspect that spoken Chinese itself is more compact on average than English. So, I am willing to struggle with the problem of multisyllable words written inside sentences without spaces between the characters as a matter of learning the code, much like learning to read Hebrew where the vowels are not written. I admit, nonetheless, that I wish it were standard Chinese practice to add spaces between whole words of characters.

Writing books used to be a very expensive endeavor before printing, and so the ancient writing in old cultures tended to be very compact, very rich in meaning, used fewer words, and the material was very important. For example, the English of the King James version of the Holy Bible is extremely compact and rich compared to modern versions. I eventually want to be able to read China's ancient literature, and so I need to be able to read traditional script written in the traditional form.

[OneEye]

You'll find that the "lack" of spaces isn't a problem in Chinese. There's just no need for it. And in fact adding spaces would be a real problem, because it isn't always clear what constitutes a word. ButIdoubteveninmodernEnglishthatspacesarereallyallthatnecessary.

[li3wei1]

I believe I've come across examples where AB is a word, and BC is a word, and the text contains ABC, in a context where either AB or BC or both would be appropriate. So there is room for ambiguity, and spaces would take that away.

[imron]

You'll find that the "lack" of spaces isn't a problem in Chinese.

It all depends on your point of view. Lack of spaces definitely causes problems with processing of Chinese text using computers for example, which in turn greatly increases the effort required to produce corpora, which in turn results in reduced resources for linguistic research and so on. There are all sorts of other problems this difficulting in processing affects too (quality of search results in text and so on).

It might not always be clear what constitutes a word, however were people to add spaces I think people would settle on conventions soon enough (just as people settled on conventions for various words during the switch from 文言文 to 白话文).

Not that I'm saying spaces are necessary, just that a lack of spaces certainly isn't without its own set of problems.

[raydpratt]

OneEye writes: "ButIdoubteveninmodernEnglishthatspacesarereallyallthatnecessary." Good point, and I admit that I can read it rapidly. However, every single word in that sentence and its grammar is absolutely familiar to me. As a learner of Chinese, I will be struggling with both.

Imron makes that point that it is not necessarily clear what a multisyllable word is in Chinese, and so it is not necessarily clear how the characters should be separated by spaces. An example that comes to mind is where Chinese will use two characters that share a common meaning so as to separate out other meanings (beautiful logic, by the way). So, in that example, is each character a word or a two-character single word? Obviously, spaces might not help me here unless I had one uniform system and accompanying look-up materials to match. Language may be too rich to make it that simple.

I'm hoping that as I learn Chinese grammar more thoroughly that I will recognize Chinese multi-syllable words in characters because that portion of the sentence won't make sense as any other type of grammatical unit. With grammar in mind, the multi-syllable words may reveal themselves as starkly as with spaces. I hope!

[roddy]

Basically, yes, put the time in and the problem goes away.

Sure, Chinese might be easier to learn if had spaces, but similarly eggs would be easier to open if they had zips. There's not a lot of point in wishing for either.