Jade Dragons Flying In The Sky - Another Instant Reading Comprehension Achievement

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a tweet today in Chinese, and I could read all the characters immediately, with no effort at all.

The line at the top said

玉龙飞天 yùlóng fēitiān, which I immediately recognised as "Jade Dragon Flying (in the) Sky"

I think I understood the meaning even before the pronunciation of some of the characters came to memory, which is what an ideographic language does for a reader.

天 tiān, meaning "sky" or "day" is one of the most commonly encountered words in Chinese, of course. The words 今天 jīntiān (today), 明天 míngtiān (tomorrow), and 昨天 zuótiān (yesterday) are encountered early on. I've talked about a mnemonic to remember this ideograph here.

龙 lóng means dragon, and any student of Chinese will encounter this word too fairly early in their journey.

飞 fēi means "to fly", and I have posted before about the ideograph resembling a hummingbird.

How did I know about 玉 yù (jade)? That isn't a very common word. Well, I learnt early on that the word 国 guó ("country") is a rectangle around the word for jade. Jade is the material from which the seal of the Chinese emperor was traditionally made, and the box therefore represents the bounded region under the emperor’s writ. I wrote about that too here.

How did I know it was pronounced "yù"? Well, I had read in the news about the Chinese moon rover 玉兔 yùtù (meaning "jade rabbit"), and the name was easy to remember. As a bonus, I'd learnt the word for rabbit too.

The video confirmed my reading of the words. It was a dance with four dancers in green robes suspended in the air.

I then looked at the words in the hashtag.

#玉龙雪山 yùlóng xuěshān

The first two characters were the same, and meant "jade dragon".

I recognised the character 雪 xuě ("snow") from a lesson on the weather. Rain is 雨 yǔ, and the ideograph strongly suggests rain seen from inside a window. 下雨 xià yǔ means "to rain" (literally "down rain"), and 下雪 xià xuě means "to snow" (literally "down snow").

山 shān means "mountain", and the ideograph evokes that image. The Chinese provinces of 山西 shānxī ("West of the mountain") and 山东 shāndōng ("East of the mountain") are well-known, and I have written about the evocative names of China's provinces too.

I had also come across the idiom 山高皇帝远 shāngāo huángdì yuǎn ("The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away"), which is similar to the English idiom "When the cats are away, the mice will play".

So the term in the hashtag meant "Jade dragon snow mountain"

Pasting both sets of words into Google Translate confirmed that my reading was correct.

I was very pleased, not only that I had managed to read whatever I was seeing, but also that I was able to understand the meaning of the text so fast, and even before I remembered the pronunciation of all the characters. (It took me a couple of seconds to remember the pronunciations of 玉 yù and 雪 xuě.)