How to guess Chinese?

It is a common misconception that Chinese characters carry a lot of meaning and the meaning of the characters can be used to guess the meaning of a multi-character word. There are just too many examples, which totally defy this notion. Here just one which I recently saw: combine 性 (sex) and 格 (line, shelf) to obtain 性格 (personality).

Now, this post should be about how it actually works. What's often the key is not the meaning of the characters, but their pronunciation! Chinese kids who learn to write obviously already know most words by pronunciation, use, and meaning. As a foreign student living in China, I also know more words by pronunciation than I know by reading and writing. This is much opposed to Western "library scholars" who tried to understand Chinese only from looking at written words!

Here's one good example of how to guess a Chinese word. From my previous experience in writing funny labels I know the word 老 which pronounces lao3 and is the first character of the word "foreigner". I also know the character 市 pronounced shi4 and meaning "city", because it appears on many signs (e.g. "Taipei city"). From taking so many Chinese I know the word lao3shi1 "teacher", although I never saw it written. So today I saw the written word 老師 which I had never seen before. But I know how to pronounce the first part (lao3) and I know that composite characters often pronounce similar to their largest parts, so I guessed lao3shi? something and remembered the word for teacher. Context of the word suggested that I had guessed correctly. (Because it was in our class text, which doesn't have such a large vocabulary.)

With this guess I have learned two new things: first, the pronunciation shi1 of the character 師 and second, how to write the word for teacher: 老師. It is important to stress that the latter is not just a corollary of the former. Knowing that "teacher" and "foreigner" both start with the sound lao3 doesn't mean they start with the same character. Only from seeing the combination 老師 written, I know that it is indeed the same first character as in 老外.

I would think that one of the most common orthography mistakes in Chinese is to write a word with characters that sound just like the word meant to be written, but which are not the correct character for that word. It's the problem of homophones just like "their, there, they're" in English. I find that English and Chinese are not so different after all in their writing systems. Chinese and English both differ from languages like French, German, Korean (and most other written languages probably) in that their pronunciation does not correspond directly to the writing. In English the gap between writing and pronunciation is bad, in Chinese it is catastrophic.