Even Complicated Chinese Characters Have Clues!

Here's how to learn Chinese like piecing together a puzzle!

Learning Chinese characters can be a daunting task. Most people think of them as lines, curves and boxes that together form nearly impossible to interpret shapes. But the truth is, all Chinese characters have clues in their structures that will help you unravel their meaning and pronunciation. 

All Chinese characters include diagrams, sounds, and meaning. ( 形、音、義 ), respectively.

If you look closely at Chinese characters, you can see that the radicals and components are easy to identify. You can use this to guess the meaning. While some radicals and components have a straightforward meaning, others have a deeper meaning.

Take, for example, the components '青 (green)' and '羊 (goat) both mean good and wonderful. Ancient Chinese people found out that looking at green fields made them happy, and added this connotation to the character's meaning. This is the '義' of the Chinese character. 

Say, if you put the character meaning “water” ”氵“and green “青” together, it means clear water, or “清”. If you put ‘person’ '亻' with  green '青', the word is '倩', which means a pretty lady.  See how all words with a '青‘ radical mean good things? That's the clue.

While the character meaning ‘goat’ “羊” simply refers to the animal now, ancient Chinese people thought the goat represented kindness and patience. When they were hunting goats, it barely cost anything and was the best sacrifice. So, the character '羊’ is correlated to good things. For example, if you put the Chinese character  ‘air’ "气“ with '羊', it means ‘oxygen’ “氧 ”, which is the good air for all of us. Once more, if you put Chinese character ‘goat’ "羊" next to food “食“, you get ‘cultivate’ ,“養”, which means growing and improving.

 Thus, the characters for ‘green’ and ‘goat’ both imply something good and beautiful. I've made an infographic below showing this.