To read Chinese. Not very well, and only traditional characters (the
simplified characters of the PRC were far beneath our dignity in Leyden,
at least, when I was a student there). But that's two decades ago,
and not much of the ancient skill still lingers.
Which is a pity, since I found four Chinese painting manuals for 50
cents each, dating from the seventies. It's all research for Krita! This
one is, judging from the contents, especially about drawing women:
Of course, I still have got all my old dictionaries... But Chinese
dictionaries are quite a pain to use. One has to know which "radical" --
the identifying part of the charachter -- the character belongs to. Then
you have to count the remaining strokes, and that's generally enough to
find the character in the dictionary.
For instance, I seem to remember that the first character of the
title belongs to the "man" radical -- that's the two strokes to the
left. The other three strokes are also a radical, namely the "earth"
radical, but it's the "man" radical that's this character's radical. If
I remember correctly, because it got less strokes than the other radical.
Look at this handout that still was in my New Practical Chinese-English
Dictionary:
So.. We turn to page 39, where the "man" radical starts, and start
looking for the characters with three extra strokes. That's on page
42/43. There we find:
We are in luck! The second meaning of the compound "shinu" means
"painting portraying beautiful women". Yes, this book is about what I
thought it was about!
Of course, when I studied Chinese you needed an extra board in your
computer with all Chinese characters baked into ROM in order to be able
to type Chinese. Internet was not for students, especially not for those
language types.
These days, it should be easy to create a Chinese dictionary
application that lets you draw the character using a stylus or your finger
or even the mouse and then checks strokes and stroke order and comes up
with the right character. However, I haven't found such an application
-- most dictionary want you to find the characters using the Pinyin
romanization. Which I don't know if I don't know the character...
Not that I am going to do that. I'm trying to optimize painting in
Krita right now, and my compile has just finished.