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Comment by namelosw | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not.

Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating".

There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" means "real(ly)". This does not make sense at all.

Still, most of the words are just between these two categories. For example "自然" means "nature", and "自" means "itself" and "然" means "happened". So "nature" means "it just happened itself". This is kind of make sense somehow but it is actually pretty blurred for most people.

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Not a native Chinese speaker, but I am a proficient speaker of Chinese as a second language. No dog in this fight except to mention that "天真" does have a "sum of its parts" aspect for me. I sometimes think of it in relation to the Chinese word for "congenital" (天生, tiānshēng). In the case of congenital, the 天 (tiān) part is better translated as "heaven", "God", "fate" or "nature", and for me, carries aspects of all of those English words. 生 (shēng) in this context means "born" as in "was born with". Think "congenital defect", a defect that you had before birth, which you could only blame God, or nature for.

So 天真 (tiānzhēn), along the same lines, roughly translated, means "then sense of reality that you have when you are born or which you are gifted by nature", unsophisticated and naive. Don't know if that makes sense, but I've always thought about these two words together and felt like I understood them better through context.

Completely agree. This is the same kind of understanding that I get when reading these words. I rarely have to translate Chinese<->English, and instead just use them naturally in everyday conversation (wife is Chinese and that’s our method of conversation). As such if you asked me to translate 天真 for example, I would have to spend a few seconds to think of the word “naive”, I would instead come up with a long descriptive English sentence similar to what you did as I feel it better captures the essence of what I’m thinking when speaking Chinese. I think it’s subtle things like this that are important to remember when attempting to gain mastery in a foreign language. I also find it interesting how different languages/cultures evolve to convey similar ideas through such different means.

Something else I find is when speaking to many of my Chinese in-laws I regularly get various stories and explanations for words and phrases. Sometimes they are straight forward and sometimes there are literary or historical references that I would have never been able to derive on my own. :)

Essen does not mean "eating" in this context.

You mixed up the word "Essen" (meal, food) with the word "Essen" (noun of the word "essen" [to eat]), which means eating.

So translated word for word, "Mittagessen" also means "noon meal".

Edit: You could go one step further and make it "mid day meal".

While 'naive' translates to 天真, 天真 doesn't just mean naive. Baidu Baike [1] lists three meanings. Going by the cited references, <<庄子·渔父>> is the oldest and my guess is "真者，故受於天也，自然不可易也。故圣人法天贵真，不拘於俗" is the etymology of 天真.

[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%A9%E7%9C%9F/1419

天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.

It’s not just a translation issue, but that the composition is just archaic. The constituents had real meaning a long time ago when they became a word, but today you just understand 天真 as its own word and move on. If you didn’t know that word but understood 天 and 真 you wouldn’t be able to figure out the word’s meaning.

The same is true with many English words as well actually: many of them started out as composites that were meaningful in the last but today are not. For example, “understand.”

Yes, 'heaven' is more precise. To reflect 'heaven' usually requires a deeper grasp of the language to twist it a little bit closer for its real meaning. And your point is great - the concept is hard to be translated into another language. For example, there are so many Buddhism concepts which is very hard to translate.

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