MeiHua/page01

The initial crop of test readers for these pages were surprised that so much of it was about signs for restaurants and other food businesses. If you've looked at the contents page and realized that only one-third of the project has to do with actual menu items, you may be surprised too. But I have not lost my mind.

Reading menus in Chinese is tricky because there is an expected way of doing things, a way of thinking, that has to be grasped ... completely APART from the problem of recognizing the characters. The text on menus is very short, and doesn't give a lot of contextual information. Reading signs will get you in the proper frame of mind; ideally this means that later, when the menus come, the only problem will be recognizing all the characters.

Besides, this started out as much about being able to read restaurant names as menus. Also, frankly, though it looks like thirty pages of signs and fifteen of menus, the menu pages are twice as long as the sign pages, so it's really more like half and half.

The sign below isn't very far from my house. I pass it every morning. Aside from that, it's also a good place to start because it's simple, direct, and you'll see all three of its characters fairly often.

The first character means GOLD. It also means "money." (I know, it doesn't look like the sign. Keep reading.)

The second character means JADE.

"Jade," in a name like this, indicates that something is precious or valuable. Using "gold" as an indicator of "best" or "quality" is something we Americans do also (gold card, etc), but not "jade" - we'd use "diamond" or something like that instead. If this were an American restaurant, it might be called the Gold Star Diner or Gold Star Inn.

"Gold" and "jade" together, since they are two precious things, are a poetic way of saying "treasures." You'll encounter other ways of saying "treasures" or "precious" or "valuable" as we go - the idea shows up on both menus and restaurant signs fairly often.

The third character, for our purposes, means INN.

It's listed in most of my dictionaries as "tower," with the comment that in modern usage it means a multistory building, or the floors of such a building. But the Golden Jade is in a one-story building!

However, James McCawley assures us that at the ends of restaurant signs it means INN. And since the ends of restaurant signs are the only place we'll see it during this exercise, that's how we're going to translate it.

THIRTY PIECES OF GOLD

The first stumbling block for a beginner is realizing that the same character seldom looks the same in two different places.

For example, you will already have noticed the blue reference character I have shown you for GOLD doesn't look much like the one on the restaurant sign. The version on the sign is very "calligraphic," which in Chinese generally means "just about unreadable." Calligraphy does not mean the same thing to the Chinese as it does to an American. It is an art form where the beauty and freehandedness of the characters - NOT their legibility - is the primary criterion. A calligraphic character is often written with one almost-continuous movement of the brush - which has the side effect of connecting strokes that shouldn't be connected, et cetera. Art, perhaps - but not good for the learner.

Here's the way the same characters appear on the Golden Jade's printed menu. These are probably easier to make out.

THINK OF IT AS A TYPEFACE

This muddle isn't only a peculiarity of Chinese, by the by; it's just that you're so used to Western letterforms that it never occurs to you that all these letter A's could be confusing to anyone.

"But those are just typefaces," you say. "I mean, they're all the same shape, really."

Certainly. And in the same way, all of the characters below are obviously "gold" to someone accustomed to Chinese, no matter how different they look from one another, or how strangely they are written.

It's hard to believe at first, but you should be able to learn to see the similarity, even with just a casual look. The trick is to be able to peel away the flashy parts or the eccentricities of people's handwriting, or a particular typeface, and just get the essential shape of the character.

RADICAL NOTIONS

As you proceed, you will notice that certain characters have the same strokes on one side as others, or are similar in other visible ways. Does this mean that the characters have something in common? Often, yes.

There are about two hundred characters in Chinese which are considered fundamentals or "radicals." These radicals are used to classify the many thousands of other characters, into groups of often (but not always) related concepts. So the "fish" radical appears somewhere in more complex characters having to do with fishy concepts; the "gold" radical turns up in characters having to do with value, metal, or money; and so on. It's not wholly consistent, but it's a good starting point when you're trying to guess what a character might mean. Each radical has a preferred location where it normally (but not always) appears in a more complex character - along the left side, along the right side, across the top, et cetera.

The radical version of a character does not always look like the full version of the same character, but in the case of the "gold" radical, it does - it just gets squnched into the left half.

Here is GOLD again, just so you don't have to scroll up.

This character is SILVER. There are also characters for "copper," "lead," and other metals ... all of which have GOLD on their left side.

This character is a POT - a cooking pot or pan (which is made of metal).

This character is BROCADE, as in fabric. I've got one book that says it also means "beautiful" and another that says "ornamental." Either way, the GOLD radical is used in the sense of something fancy or valuable.

(In case you were wondering why I'm bothering to draw a character for such an offbeat concept as BROCADE, it's only because we will see it as part of a very common menu phrase later. Don't worry about it until then.)

The part of the character that isn't the radical is sometimes an additional clue to the meaning ... but the clue is often really obscure. For example, BROCADE has a right half that refers to "silk," and is literally "silk as precious as gold." Or was, once upon a time.

And, just as often, the rest of the character is a cue to its SOUND, not its meaning. The right half of POT tells someone (someone who knows more Chinese than we do!) that it the character is going to end in a "uo" sound. (The character is pronounced "guo," in case you're curious.)

Better to just learn a handful of characters on sight, and not worry too much about dissecting them.

Nonetheless, I'll mention radicals every so often, just because it's a useful way of seeing which characters have something in common, and helping you to recognize grouped concepts ... such as, say, cooking methods (almost all of which have the "fire" radical in them somewhere).