As a native Chinese speaker I'm not sure about how a foreigner feels when he's picking up these chinese chars, but I do feel much better to remember new english words after dividing them into their original form, prefixies and sufficies.Now I can guess for the meaning of an english word even if I have never met it before.
My point is, this method can also be applied to studying Chinese. Modern Chinese words are seldom built with a single char(as opposed to the ancient Chineses). A character in Chineses does have some meanings, but not too detailed. I do not have enough linguistic knowledge but it feels like we need "modifiers" plus these "meta meanings" together to build a word.
From the perspective of a programmer let me show you some examples:
子 -- Meta, means "sub", "child", "unit"
节点 -- Noun, means "node"
子节点 -- Child node
系统 -- Noun, means "system" (I believe this word comes from English because the pronounciation is similar to "system" :-D )
子系统 -- Subsystem
弹 -- Meta, means "Ammo" or "something moving in high speed"
子弹 -- A small, single unit of ammo(just bullet, not bombs, a bomb is too big to be described by "子")
原 -- Meta, means "meta"( :-D ), or "original"
原子 -- A "meta unit" or "original unit" should be an atom shouldn't it?
Hope this will make you better understand how we construct words. :-)
And for grammar, I think the best way to learn grammar is to observe how native speakers speak. Every language have some fixed ways so it will be fast for one to adapt to it.
As a native Chinese speaker I'm not sure about how a foreigner feels when he's picking up these chinese chars, but I do feel much better to remember new english words after dividing them into their original form, prefixies and sufficies.Now I can guess for the meaning of an english word even if I have never met it before.
My point is, this method can also be applied to studying Chinese. Modern Chinese words are seldom built with a single char(as opposed to the ancient Chineses). A character in Chineses does have some meanings, but not too detailed. I do not have enough linguistic knowledge but it feels like we need "modifiers" plus these "meta meanings" together to build a word.
From the perspective of a programmer let me show you some examples:
子 -- Meta, means "sub", "child", "unit" 节点 -- Noun, means "node" 子节点 -- Child node 系统 -- Noun, means "system" (I believe this word comes from English because the pronounciation is similar to "system" :-D ) 子系统 -- Subsystem 弹 -- Meta, means "Ammo" or "something moving in high speed" 子弹 -- A small, single unit of ammo(just bullet, not bombs, a bomb is too big to be described by "子") 原 -- Meta, means "meta"( :-D ), or "original" 原子 -- A "meta unit" or "original unit" should be an atom shouldn't it?
Hope this will make you better understand how we construct words. :-)
And for grammar, I think the best way to learn grammar is to observe how native speakers speak. Every language have some fixed ways so it will be fast for one to adapt to it.