How Chinese Characters Are Built: A Beginner's Guide

At first, Chinese characters can look like tangles of lines. But almost every character is made of smaller, reusable parts. Once you can see those parts, learning a new character stops being memorizing a picture and becomes putting together pieces you already know.

Four ways characters are built

1. Pictures: pictographs

A small number of characters started as drawings of things. Over centuries they became more abstract, but the original idea is often still visible:

Character	Meaning	Originally a picture of
人	person	a person seen from the side
木	tree	a tree with branches and roots
口	mouth	an open mouth
日	sun	the sun
月	moon	a crescent moon

Pictographs are few, but they are important because they become building blocks for many other characters.

2. Signs: simple indicatives

Some ideas are hard to draw, so they are shown with simple signs. 一, 二 and 三 are one, two and three lines. 上 (up) and 下 (down) mark a position above or below a line.

3. Combined meanings: compound ideographs

Two or more parts are put together, and their meanings combine:

• 林 (lín, woods) = 木 + 木: two trees make a grove.
• 休 (xiū, to rest) = 亻 (person) + 木 (tree): a person leaning against a tree.

Notice that 人 changes shape to 亻 when it sits on the left of a character. Many components have a narrower form like this.

4. Meaning + sound: phono-semantic compounds

This is by far the most common type. One part hints at the meaning, and the other hints at the pronunciation.

• 妈 / 媽 (mā, mom) = 女 (woman, meaning) + 马 / 馬 (mǎ, horse; here for sound)
• 清 (qīng, clear) = 氵 (water, meaning) + 青 (qīng, sound)
• 晴 (qíng, sunny) = 日 (sun, meaning) + 青 (qīng, sound)

The sound hint is not always exact (languages change over thousands of years), but it is often close. Once you notice that 青 appears in 清, 晴 and 请 / 請 (qǐng, to ask, please), all pronounced something like “qing”, these characters become much easier.

What is a radical?

A radical is the component a dictionary uses to file a character. Many dictionaries, following the 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary, use a system of 214 radicals; dictionaries in mainland China today use a slightly revised list of about 200. The radical is often the meaning part:

Radical	Meaning	Examples
亻	person	你 他 休
氵	water	河 海 清
木	tree, wood	林 树 桌
口	mouth	吃 喝 叫
女	woman	妈 姐 好

(树 and 妈 are Simplified; the Traditional forms are 樹 and 媽.)

Origin stories vs memory tricks

There are two kinds of explanation you will see for characters, and it helps to keep them apart:

• Origin (etymology): how the character actually developed. 林 really is two trees.
• Memory trick (mnemonic): a story made up to help you remember. It can be useful even if it has nothing to do with history.

Both are useful. Just be careful not to treat a memory trick as a fact about where the character came from.

Why this makes learning faster

If you know 木, you already know half of 林 and half of 休. Each component you learn makes many future characters easier. That is why it makes sense to learn components in order, from simple to complex, rather than characters in a random list.

Hanzibloc’s course is built this way. As you write a character, the component you are writing lights up, so the structure becomes part of the movement of your hand.

FAQ

What is a radical in Chinese?

A radical is the component a dictionary uses to group a character. It often hints at the meaning: characters with 氵 (water) often relate to liquids, characters with 亻 (person) often relate to people.

How many components do I need to learn?

There is no fixed number, but start with the most common ones, such as 亻 (person), 氵 (water), 木 (tree), 口 (mouth) and 女 (woman). Each one appears in many everyday characters, so learning them early makes new characters easier.