5201314

My teacher who taught me English in China said that vocabulary is like bricks for building a building and grammar is like the blueprint of the building. Just like bricks and blueprint are very essential in building a building, vocabulary and grammar are indispensable in mastering a language. Vocabulary is one of the biggest barriers in foreign language studying.

The writing system of English is alphabetic and Chinese is logographic. This difference makes it really different in memorizing English words and Chinese characters. According to my personal experiences, memorizing English words almost equal to memorize their meanings and pronunciations; for Chinese characters, it almost equals to memorize their shapes and meanings. My mom said if you know how to pronounce the English word, basically you are able to spell it. However, there is no way to conjecture a Chinese character`s shape from its pronunciation, on the contrary, the pronunciation may be conjectured from its shape. Some people devised some interesting methods to memorize English words by giving sense to the shape of the words just like what we do in memorizing Chinese characters. There are lots of ways to “give sense to the words”, I’m going to introduce one of them, which applies 谐音 in some words. In this blog, I will only introduce 谐音 by giving a Chinese example “5201314” and the way of utilize which into vocabulary memorizing will be given in my next blog. 

Due to my limited vocabulary, I am not able to find an exact translation for “谐音” into English. It means that replace the original word with another one or more letters, words or numbers which share the same or similar tomes with the original word, for instance, lots of people use “4” instead of “for” and “u” instead of “you” when sending messages. In Chinese, we have the similar way of playing words and actually it can be seen everywhere in our lives. I am going to give a modern example but it has existed in Chinese language history for more thousands of years. 

Currently, some young people use “520”to express their love to their girl/boyfriends because it sounds similar to “I love you” in Chinese, which is “我爱你”. In Pinyin, the pronunciations of “5” is “wu”, “2” is “er”, “0” is “nin”； by comparison, “我 (I)” is “wo”， “爱 (love)” is “ai”， “您 (you)” is “ning”. “我 (wo)” and “5 (wu)”, “爱 (ai)” and “2 (er)”, “您 (nin)” and “0 (ling)”, thus, it is reasonable to use “520” to replace “我爱你” or “I love you”. 

If “I love you” is not enough, we also have “I love you forever”, which is “5201314”. “1314” represents “一生一世”， which means “all one’s life”. The two “1”s are “one” in English and “一” in Chinese. The pronunciations of “3” is “san”, “4” is “si”, and “生” is “sheng”, “世” is “shi”. The similarities of “生 (sheng)” and “3 (san)”, “世 (shi)” and “4 (si)” makes it a particular collocation for using “1314” for “一生一世”. Therefore, a boy would promise his girlfriend that he loves her for his whole life by saying “I love you forever”, or “我爱你一生一世”， or “5201314”.

In my next blog, I am going to introduce the way of  applying “谐音” into “giving sense to words” though Pinyin and Chinese.