Chinese and Zen

I like languages and recently have been turning my attention to Chinese—studying it with Jacob. Chinese has always seemed intimidatingly difficult to me. Once I started learning it, it seems a little less complicated and extremely rich as languages go. It's complexity is also making me more interested in many of the Zen texts that are translated into English. To the extent that Dogen wrote in Chinese and in Japanese and often relied on wordplay, it seems difficult to rely on many of the translations we have in English without extensive commentary on the characters used. As I'm learning Chinese radicals, it seems everything can turn on the character. This in turn has me questioning in discussion periods after Dharma talks exactly what characters are used in the original. N.B. I know the Zen injunction on heavy reading early on but am ignoring it and balancing it with regular practice. You can't not ask.

This particulary came up in a study of the the Ten Grave Precepts which were being discussed. As presented, the precepts were each preceded by an English dependent clause that shifted them toward a Western sense of ethics that emphasized our notions of "I" and the autonomous person. However, as I understand it, the precepts aren't that clear. For example, the first simply translated is "no kill." This could be an injunction, a description, a statement of reality, or simply all three. Without knowing the characters of the original, it's hard to say how to approach it. It would certainly be impossible to understand without practice but even with practice, bad translation can lead a novice to error. In some ways this is the ongoing and great debate that I'm only slightly beginning to be aware of in Zen about how much Western influence can there be before it is no longer Zen and the relationship of discipline/form with freedom within the approach.

I digress. My hope is to make it beyond "survival Chinese" as one of my texts refers to it and pick up a more conversational ability over the next year.

Things of interest so far...

1. Chinese has over ten dialects, perhaps more, which are unintelligble to each other when spoken. Yet, the written language is understood by every literate speaker regardless of dialect.
2. There are two types of Chinese characters traditional and simplified. Simplified represents an effort by the PRC to make the more complex traditional system easier and increase literacy. However, it seems learning simplified characters first will make it impossible to ever learn to read traditional characters.
3. Chinese has five tones, if you count one tone as no tone. They are up, down, down-up, flat. These were impossible to understand until they were drawn on a musical scale. The same sound, depending on tone, can have five different meanings, and the same word and tone, e.g. ta(4), meaning he, she, or it is impossible to figure out what is meant without context or seeing the character used.
4. The character for I (我) is a combination of the character for hand (手) and the character for lance (戈). Learning the radicals this way makes it easy to remember how to write them. When writing "I", you think "hand + lance".
5. Penmanship. There is a prescribed order for writing the strokes and penmanship conveys meaning. The characters should be uniform in size and proportional. This is exceedingly challenging.
6. Chinese speakers love wordplay and the language is built for it.