The Simplicity Of Chinese Grammar - 3 (A Lego Approach To Vocabulary)

The sheer number of characters in Chinese is daunting to a beginner. One needs to learn hundreds of characters, maybe over a thousand, in order to be functionally literate in the language.

(I personally don't believe it's that bad. My vocabulary at present doesn't exceed 300 characters, and yet I often find that 50% to 80% of the characters I come across in a piece of text are those I already know. I think by the time I learn about 800 characters, I should be able to read long passages without having to resort to Google Translate.)

One cheering aspect, though, is that the Chinese approach to vocabulary resembles a Lego-style assembly of simple characters.

I read on another learner's blog that he was searching for the word for "bottle-opener" in French. He knew that the word for "bottle" was "bouteille", and that for "to open" was "ouvrir". He was wondering how to conjugate the words to combine them into a single word, until he learnt that the French word for "bottle-opener" was in fact "décapsuleur". There was no way he could have derived that from the words he already knew.

In Mandarin, though, he found that the word for "bottle-opener" was 开瓶器 kāi píng qì, literally "open bottle device".

What could be simpler?

Here's another example:

洗手间 xǐ shǒu jiān ("toilet", literally "wash hand room")

Yet another example:

飞 fēi ("to fly") (Check out this post.)

飞机 fēijī ("aeroplane", literally "fly machine")

飞机场 fēijī chǎng ("airport", literally "fly machine field")

But of all the examples I've heard, the best is "plumber".

水管工人 shuǐguǎn gōngrén (literally, "water pipe work person")