@5inque_wu
My guy pronounced "说文解字“ like a Chinese college professor ready to give a lecture. 10/10.
@retrosapien1
your tones and pronunciation are on point. shattered my expectations after you said "i don't know chinese"
@jiaruiwang8411
isotopes of hydrogen, in Chinese hydrogen - 氢 ¹H protium - 氕 ²H deuterium -氘 ³H tritium - 氚 it's basically a 气 plus some amount of vertical strokes corresponding to the number of protons and neutrons it has combined. I think it's pretty cool and deserves some glaze from me
@LysanderSheng
As a Chinese and a phd in chemisty, I'd say Chinese periodic table was one of the best thing ever happened in chemistry for Chinese ppl. Single character elements make them much more easy to remember - both writing and pronouncing. When I was pursueing my phd in the US, I really put some efforts in remembering all the elements in English, which are usually long and sometimes twist the tougue.
@bruh-th5ft
fun fact, while periodic table is a relatively new thing, those elements characters in chinese language isn't. This is because of the tradition of ancient chinese emperors naming their successors with elemental names with metal water wood fire and earth, which created a lot of useless characters just to name their kids that accidentally helped modern chinese chemist to name elements
@stardust9470
"I know nothing about chemistry except for opioids" goes so hard for no reason
@vegtab6556
Fun fact: A large amount of these characters are actually invented by the emperors of the Ming Dynasty to name their children, way before modern Chemistry.
@AlexTrioxide
Ironic how I as a Chinese descendant and chemistry nerd am listening to someone who "doesn't speak any Chinese" and "knows nothing about chemistry" tell me about the Chinese periodic table. Either way, still a great video!
@LAFN-si1oz
This also goes true for organic functional groups in Chinese. For example, all alkanes are called 烷 wan2. CH4 is 甲烷, C2H6 is 乙烷 and so on. The first part (corresponding to prefixes like meth- or eth-) is from the ten heavenly stems (甲乙丙丁戊及庚辛壬癸), after 10 it will be numbers, for example C11H24 would be 十一烷 lit. eleven alkane. These functional groups either take the radical for fire (火, as in 烷 alkane 烃 alkene 炔 alkyne), grass (艹/草, as in 苯, benzene), alcohol (酉, as in 醇 alcohol 酮 ketone 醛 aldehyde 酯 ester 醚 ether), or meat (月, a simplified form of earlier 肉, as in 胺 amine 腈 nitrile 膦 phosphine, note how 胺 腈 膦 have a similar pronunciation to 氨NH4 氰-CN, cyanide and 磷 phosphorus)
@xenonx.4172
Some minor corrections from a native speaker: 1:04 - 因 is pronounced yīn, so 爱因斯坦 is closer to ài yīn sī tǎn, in case you wonder why it doesn't match exactly. 2:10 - Well, the coinage of new characters is limited today because everything is electronized, so good luck getting whatever official to accept your new name with a character you just made up. Most (usually obsolete in modern days) characters that exist are purely used for personal names because people have always wanted to be unique. 7:40 - I would say 钠 is chosen not because nà is a secondary reading of 内, but rather because most compound characters involving 内 as the phonetic component is pronounced as such (examples: 呐/纳 etc), so it would be more intuitive to use 钠 as nà. 10:50 - "distaste for monosyllabic words" is true, but not to the degree usually described by common Mandarin tutorials. There are still a lot of concepts/words in Mandarin where a monosyllabic word instead of the disyllabic alternative is preferred. In fact, most natives find texts generated by other non-native learners and certain machine translations overly clumsy and unnatural because they overuse compound words lol
@xulynn6442
As a Chinese living overseas, this video just reminded me how beautiful the Chinese language system is
@alkaraine2276
Fun fact: To make sure the chemistry naming is as simplified as possible, the Chinese pioneers of translating modern chemistry has also created similar unified characters for organic chemistry. Let's welcome the 火 groups (non-arene hydrocarbons), 酉 groups (hydro-oxyl-carbonates), 月 groups (HNCO chemicals) and 艹 groups (arenes and other chemicals with pi rings): 烷(alkanes) 烯(alkenes) 醛(aldehydes) 醇(alcohols) 酮(ketones) 酯(esters) 肽(peptites) 胺(amines) 苯(benzene) 萘(naphthalene) 苷(glycosides) Apart from these hanzis, sequential hanzis are also used to indicate the number of carbon atoms within the compound. For example, “三硝基甲苯” means trinitrotoluene (or TNT). It literally means "Benzene with 1 extra carbon atom and three NO2 radicals".
@A_doe_wasting_her_life
If you go to bilibili you can find a lot of videos mishearing lyrics in other languages to the periodic table. I had no idea why the periodic table of all things but i see now
@OrchidAlloy
You vastly undersold your Chinese studying
@xuanjat77
然而中国的中学生可以轻易的背诵这个，因为每个元素只有一个音节，可以连贯的构建一个诗歌。同时可以利用汉字作为象形字的优势，判断元素的性质（如气态，金属，非金属等）。不仅如此，中国最普通的中学生也会学习常见元素的性质和经典的化学反应，已经常见化合物的性质和作用。这就导致一个接受了基础教育的中国人可以轻易的知道身边的物质的益处或者危险。
@Yiming-k9h
In the Ming Dynasty, emperors named their descendants following the Five Elements theory, using characters with “metal,” “wood,” “water,” “fire,” or “earth” （金木水火土） radicals to ensure prosperity. As the royal family grew, rare and newly-created characters were used. Centuries later, when scientists translated the periodic table into Chinese, they discovered these Ming-era names were perfect for representing elements.
@VieShaphiel
Most element names were coined in an age where creating new Chinese characters was still relatively straightforward: even if you didn't know how to make new printing blocks, you could cut the existing blocks and combine them. Nowadays they have to be elevated to the Unicode Consortium and wait for font vendors to support them. That's why only new elements still get this treatment for consistency. I guess this is also one of the reasons they are monosyllabic: they were invented when monosyllabic words were tolerated more than they are today, because scholars were still writing in classical Chinese.
@umi3017
Wait until this guy discovers organic chemistry in Chinese.
@itsphoenixingtime
One other cool aspect of Chinese chemistry terms is that they have pretty cool characters for the isotopes of Hydrogen. Alternatively Hydrogen can be represented as: 氕(pie1) which is just 气 + 1 stroke, denoting that it has 1 nucleon. Hence, the heavier versions represent: 氘(dao1): Air + 2 strokes = Deuterium 氚(chuan1): Air + 3 strokes = Tritium Moreover the terms for particles are kinda meaningful too. Atom: 原子 (Origin + bit, because matter originates from atoms) Electron: 电子 (Electricity + bit, because electricity/charge flow is caused by electrons) Proton: 质子 (Essence + bit, since the properties of an atom are defined by its proton count) Neutron: 中子 (Neutral + bit, similar to Neutral=>Neutron) Ion: 离子 (Leave + bit, since some ions are formed by electrons leaving the parent atom. The distinctions between cation and anion are made with 阴/阳, like chinese's Yin-Yang opposite [opposite charges] Molecule: 分子 (Fragment/piece + bit, since molecules are also in some sense, bits of matter) These are my interpretations and are most likely not 100% correct but this is just me finding out how cool Chinese terms for chemistry are. There is a whole song of Chinese chemistry terms [a parody of a song about rare characters] called 化学生僻字, so maybe you could check that out too,
@xiaq