Learning Chinese: Reading vs Speaking

Being able to read Chinese gives me zero advantages when it comes to speaking the language. With English, and other languages that use alphabets, if you can visually comprehend a word, and you know some of the language's phonemes, you can usually make a stab at sounding out, and thus saying, the word. You know, words like "through," or "facade" or "bureaucracy" aside. Even Korean works this way. But with a Chinese character it's pretty much that either you know the associated sound-word, or you don't.

But as with both language in general, and China specifically, things are never that simple. Which brings me to this: 拿铁. I was researching a couple of characters on a take-away menu from the local department store's coffee shop, and I ran across this: 拿铁. Looking them up separately (because of the whole no-spaces-between-words thing, I can't really identify compound-character words unless I already know them) yielded this literal translation: "to catch [the element] iron." More than a little confused, I looked them up together, and you know what 拿铁 is? "Latte"! As in, what you order at Starbucks! Can you guess why "to catch iron" also means "latte"?

The answer is after the jump.

It's because 拿 is pronounced /la/ and 铁 is pronounced /tay/. Seriously! This is the common Chinese language solution to new and/or Western words [the Coke example is probably the most famous; also, see the post regarding my name], and while it makes perfect sense, it also means that reading Chinese got that much more difficult for me because if I can't comprehend a set of characters, and I don't know how to pronounce them either, then I'm just out and out screwed :P .



There are two super awesome sites I have been using to augment my learning.

1. nciku: super excellent sketch-detector (I can draw in a character with a mouse, and it will give me a selection of viable characters to choose from and then look up); lousy dictionary

2. Yellow Bridge Chinese-English Dictionary: lousy sketch-detector; super excellent dictionary