From the earliest memory of any boy and sometimes every girl, they are given a ball and they throw it.  If it’s such an important toy and word to know, why is “Ball” in Chinese so stinking hard to write?  As you can see above I had consistent difficulties with one of the strokes.  Now that’s it’s been almost 10 years since I studied this, the Chinese for ball “qiu” can’t be anything else.  It’s been ingrained in my head, ingrained in my brain and ingrained in my long term memory.  I might not be able to write it perfectly now every time but I can certainly recognize it and pronounce it with the second tone.

Chinese Study Tools:

We actually own this book (it’s a long story how we got it) and A Handbook for Analyzing Chinese Characters (Chinese Edition) is actually really useful.  Coming in just over 1000 pages this exhaustive book is perfect for any hardcore Chinese learner.  Right away in each entry you are faced with a number 1-5 which tells you the frequency that you’ll see the word (1 being super high frequency and 5 being rare but you’ll see it) and each entry also has not only sample sentences but the pinyin of each.  The cost will freak you out but it’s well worth it because it was a labor of love for the author.  Highly recommended for the serious student!

Tags: Chinese Class

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2012 at 12:00 am and is filed under 2012, Chinese Class, Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.