Chinese Characters, Condensed

Writing records speech, so a character links a form to the sound and meaning of a spoken word. A character is one item with three links, and each link strengthens and decays independently. The form breaks down into functional components. A component can give a picture, a sense, or a pronunciation cue, or it can do nothing, and its job is set separately in each character; the same shape can have different jobs in different characters. When the script is analyzed by function, it is not arbitrary. From an unfamiliar character’s components you can predict its meaning domain and syllable range before you open the dictionary, and you can rebuild a half-forgotten form from the sound and sense you still remember. A character’s senses derive from one original meaning, so most glosses can be derived and do not need to be memorized. Study starts from the spoken word: you link each new form to a word you already know by sound. Immersion remains the main activity, and the whole system is built to support it.

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1. The basic rules

• One item, three links. Form–sound, form–meaning, and sound–meaning strengthen and decay independently. A single “do I know this character?” judgment does not show which link has failed, so train and test each link separately (Three Attributes of a Character).
• Characters record spoken words. The ideographic myth says they record ideas. The myth is wrong, because every script follows the same rule: a written shape exists to bring a spoken word to mind (Three Attributes).
• Decompose to functional components, then stop. Cutting a character into smaller pieces than that produces shapes that explain nothing, and analysis at that depth gives no useful information (Surface vs Deep Structure).
• The radical is where a dictionary files a character. Dictionary lookup is the one use of the radical you can rely on. The recurring mistake is to use a surface fact to answer a deep-structure question (Surface vs Deep Structure).
• Roles are assigned character by character. 立 gives the meaning in 端, gives the sound in 拉, and has no function in 音. Classify the components of every new glyph again from the start (Surface vs Deep Structure, hub).

2. Components, by job

• Form components work by depicting something. Corruption of the shapes has removed the resemblance from many modern glyphs, and the ancient form shows the scene that can be pictured. Look at the ancient form once, the first time you meet the character, or you will use a folk parse in its place (Form Components).
• Meaning components are abstract extensions of a concrete original meaning. 力, a plow, gives the meanings power, effort, and toil to characters that have nothing to do with farming. Study a semantic series as one unit, and test every reading against the other characters in the series: one character that does not fit shows that a mnemonic is wrong (Meaning Components).
• Sound components cue a syllable range. They never give the exact reading. Predict the range, look up the answer, and learn the tone as a separate fact. Sound components are about as accurate as English spelling. They are imperfect, and a reader still needs them (Sound Components).
• Sound series ignore tone. In speech, the tone must be exact. When the rhymes across a series show no pattern, the connection is in the initials. There are seven groups of related initials, and each group is verified by where the mouth makes contact (Sound Series).
• Declared relatedness makes new instances easy to learn. An authoritative statement that “these initials belong together” does not prevent any sound change. Once that grouping is accepted, new instances of the pattern are learned with almost no effort (Sound Series).
• Empty components get a one-line causal explanation and are pictured as glass. An explanation such as “Mark splitting this glyph from its twin” stops the search for a memory hook that never existed. Picturing the part as glass in the mnemonic image stores the fact that the part has no function (Empty Components).

3. Senses

• A character is explained through its original meaning. The form depicts only the sense the character was invented to write. Where everyday usage has moved away from that sense, the form stays arbitrary until the original meaning is known (Meaning Trees).
• Almost no character is a flat list of unrelated glosses. Roughly 85% of comprehensive-dictionary entries carry derived senses and ~18% carry sound loans. Mark the loans, set aside the senses that can be derived, and memorize only the original meaning and the steps that derive the other senses from it (Meaning Trees).

4. The practice loops

• Always learn the spoken word first. Attach a new glyph to a word you already know by sound and meaning. The form then links to a sound and a meaning you already know, and you do not have to learn form, sound, and meaning all at once (Three Attributes, Pipelining).
• Pipeline the attributes over three sessions. Practice the spoken word in one direction in the first session, the reverse direction in the next session, and the form in the third. Cohorts of 3–5 overlap, with a new cohort starting while earlier cohorts are still in progress, so one cohort still completes every session and the cost per item drops sharply (The Pipelining Strategy).
• Produce a candidate list in your head, the way an IME does. When you cannot recall a form partway through writing it, list the sound components that could represent the syllable, list the meaning components that fit the sense, especially original senses, and compare the two lists until you recognize the character. About 50 characters learned by function are enough to start using the method (The IME Method).
• Predict before lookup, every time. Choose a meaning domain and a set of syllables before you check the dictionary. Making that committed guess is what encodes the character in memory (Sound Components, Problem-First Learning).
• The cluster is part of Preparation. Character study prepares you for immersion, and immersion remains the main activity. Both loops assume immersion is already giving you spoken vocabulary and reading volume (hub, Preparation).
• The seven memorization rules explain why this study is worth the effort. Meaning strengthens encoding. Encoding does not happen without attention. Repetition consolidates what was encoded. Functional decomposition applies those rules to a script (Rules of Effective Memorization).

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The cluster leaves out the following topics on purpose. Stroke order and the regional writing standards are surface-layer facts, and Surface vs Deep Structure says where they belong. General language-learning doctrine is covered by Aim-Shoot-Skin. The reader tooling that applies this cluster is Tsumugu. Cursive has no public owner pages yet, because that track has been deferred on purpose.