Preface
Introduction
This book is a continuation of the first book Learn Chinese Without Writing (LCWW1). It shares the same goal of helping you to develop the ability to extract critical information—structures, patterns and relationships between strokes—from Chinese characters.
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If you have read LCWW1, this book will be easy for you. If you have not read it, there are two revision exercises for the 35 strokes and a recap of the key idea ‘Triple ABCs Concept’ and geometry concepts.
As we are introducing new concepts and terminologies on how to analyse Chinese characters—never taught elsewhere—we recommend that you start from LCWW1 even if you already know Chinese. Concepts you learnt in LCWW1 will be applied in this and subsequent books.
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Challenges
Chinese language is not an exact science. It was never a practice to explain every single detail (e.g. how long a stroke should be, how close or far apart the strokes should be, where do they intersect exactly). It is always at the discretion of the learner after he/she has observed, practiced, reflected and internalised his/her learning. This tacit learning habit is something many native learners do instinctively without realising. For foreign learners, some form of coaching is definitely required but there is hardly any resource available at the point of creating these books.
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It was a challenge to create this book, describing the characteristics of Chinese characters and getting them organised. It was difficult because there was no precedent and we have to think differently beyond what was taught.
Behind-the-Scene
Understanding the daunting tasks all beginners have to go through that require full capacity of their brains, we figure out that we have to find some patterns in Chinese characters and work out the mechanisms on how to 'construct' these characters. If learners have clear guidance, then they could decipher, configure, extrapolate ... on their own. They will feel empowered to possess the ability to 'see' Chinese characters in a different light.
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Hence, we decided to work backwards...starting with 5,000 plus (now more are included) frequently-used simplified Chinese characters and dissected each of them in unconventional ways. The old way of dividing characters is not good enough to analyse and classify them by appearance. We analysed how the parts and strokes of each character were put together ...this would be the way we will take them apart for scrutiny.
Then we classified the qTRAILS Alphabets—parts with the same stroke pattern—as a group and got 32 stroke patterns for basic alphabets. Variations can be derived from these 32 stroke patterns by modifying or adding a stroke to the basic alphabets. There are a few exceptions. The maximum number of strokes for these Chinese alphabets is six (6) and the minimum number is two (2).
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Overview of 3 Books
In LCWW1, you 'see' through the lenses of Geometry ... you see shapes, curves, lines, angles. In this book LCWW2, you will see patterns through the stroke order of Chinese characters. To help you remember them better, we lined up parts with the same stroke pattern on a trail. We call it qTRAIL (pronounced as 'q-TRAIL') (quick trail). The parts on the trails are called qTRAILS Alphabets (see diagram on previous page). Like what we did in LCWW1, we hope to develop your ability to 'see' patterns at a glance—this time with the use of colours. Six colours will be used to show you the sequence the strokes of each alphabet have to be written.
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In the upcoming book LCWW3, you will learn to see patterns through structures . If LCWW2 is the 'Chinese Alphabets Book', then LCWW3 will be the 'Chinese Spelling Book', that is it shows you how to 'spell' (construct) Chinese characters. In contrast to English words which are always spelt from left to right, Chinese characters have more than a dozen types of basic structures. When these structures are combined to form complex structures, there is a myriad of possibilities. LCWW2 shows you the stroke order, LCWW3 will show you the part order of characters.
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© 2017 by W.Q. Blosh