Comments on: The building blocks of Chinese, part 6: Learning and remembering compound words

By: Remembering is a skill you can learn | Hacking Chinese

Remembering is a skill you can learn | Hacking Chinese — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 01:04:36 +0000

[…] Chain characters together to form words. Thinking of “computer”, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo), as “electric” + “brain” is great, but also visualise frying that wobbly piece of fatty tissue with huge electrodes sending bolts of lightning through it. […]

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 06:45:11 +0000

In reply to Mark. Yes, indeed, that's definitely a typo! Thank you for letting me know about it; I have already updated the article. And happy to hear that you found the series helpful!

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 19:33:49 +0000

Great article! Like the others in this series it helped me a lot to get a better understanding of characters and words.

One small thing I wanted to point out: I think in the sentence “This can mean that other words get inserted between the verb and the object, as in 睡不了睡 (shuì bu liǎo jiào) …” it should be 睡不了觉 instead of 睡不了睡, shouldn’t it?

By: Student Q&A, December 2023: How many words to learn, if it's good to learn radicals, and whether to learn simplified or traditional characters | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 09:37:06 +0000

[…] Learning Chinese words really fast […]

By: Is Chinese difficult to learn? | Hacking Chinese

Is Chinese difficult to learn? | Hacking Chinese — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 19:30:30 +0000

[…] Learning thousands of collocations – To sound natural in Chinese, you need to know which words tend to go with which other words, which is called “collocations” in linguistics. In Chinese, the sun is “big” when it’s sunny (太阳很大, tàiyang hěn dà), and so is “rain” when it rains (雨很大 yǔ hěn dà). There is no way to know this without having encountered these phrases, so the only way to learn it is on a case-by-case basis, and then sometimes by spotting patterns. This can be hard, though. For example, there are many characters that mean “person” in some sense, including 家 (jiā), e.g. 作家 (zuòjiā) “author”, 者 (zhě), e.g. 记者 (jìzhě) “journalist”, 生 (shēng), e.g. 学生 (xuésheng) “student”, 师 (shī), e.g. 律师 (lǜshī) “lawyer”, 人 (rén), eg. 军人 (jūnrén) “soldier”. How do you know when to use which? You don’t, unless you have encountered words these characters are contained in many, many times. Read more in this article: The building blocks of Chinese, part 6: Learning and remembering compound words. […]

By: How to learn Chinese characters: My best advice | Hacking Chinese

How to learn Chinese characters: My best advice | Hacking Chinese — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:17:28 +0000

[…] The building blocks of Chinese, part 6: Learning and remembering compound words – Words in Chinese can look chaotic and be hard to understand, but when you understand why they are structured the way they are, it becomes much easier. In general, words are constructed the same way as phrases, meaning that in nouns, the core noun is on the right (same as when describing nouns in a normal phrase), and that in verbs, the main verb is on the left (just as verbs appear on the left of objects in normal sentences too). Many words also have prefixes or suffixes, and just like when learning other languages, understanding these makes learning words much easier. This article looks at how words work and how you can use that knowledge to make sense of them and remember them more effectively. […]

By: Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 2: From sound to meaning in Mandarin - Hacking Chinese

Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 2: From sound to meaning in Mandarin - Hacking Chinese — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 17:25:28 +0000

[…] The building blocks of Chinese, part 6: Learning and remembering compound words […]

By: Continuing Chinese after Duolingo – Duolinguists

Continuing Chinese after Duolingo – Duolinguists — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 04:41:45 +0000

[…] HSK list of Mandarin words http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html most common 3000 words https://www.hackingchinese.com/how-to-learn-words-really-fast/ deconstructing words and making stories to learn fast […]

By: SecondQuantized

SecondQuantized — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 03:50:38 +0000

In reply to Olle Linge. Ok, thank you!

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 08:50:21 +0000

In reply to SecondQuantized. While there could certainly be native speakers who accept that sentence, I checked with a native teacher from Beijing and she said it sounds outright wrong without a 睡. Searching for the phrase gives only two hits, and even with a wider search, I can’t really find much reason to believe phrases like that work or are common!