Could you provide a few examples and elaborate a bit on why you don’t find it helpful? I think I can guess, but all words have different meanings in different contexts, and clearly the same word being used as a verb will not have the same meaning as when it’s a noun, and this is also very common in Chinese. My general answer to this is that you should use flashcards to learn the basic definition, meaning, pronunciation and so on, but that beyond that, you should much, much more reading and listening than you do flashcards. Then you will see these words being used in context. If you’re struggling with a particular usage that seems completely different from the basic meaning (this does happen), you can study sentences instead. You can do this in Skritter, too, although it’s a little bit awkward because cloze deletion isn’t really built into the app.

There, the article is now published! It took an awful lot of time to write and I’m not even happy with the result, but hopefully, someone might get something out of it. If not, you can wait for next week’s article which will be a bit more practical. This week’s article is here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 5: Making sense of Chinese words

Awesome! These last 2 days I’ve been reading lots of your posts before starting learning Chinese so I can have a smart strategy to learn it efficiently, and it helps a lot! 🙂

I originally intended to publish it tomorrow, but it’s taking much longer to edit than I thought, so probably the week after that! The fact that you asked about it adds a little bit of energy that I can use to get it done. 🙂

Thanks for your reply – it’s definitely a tricky issue. I suppose in practice it comes down to whether learning the rule saves you time or improves accuracy in the long run, but it’s hard to know and of course people are different. It reminds be of how the top performers in spelling bees memorise the spelling rules of Greek, Latin, French etc and can then spell words they’ve never heard before, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile for the average person to learn that way. It’d be nice if there was a more systematic resource for this find of knowledge. For example I’d love it if dictionaries indicated whether a word’s meaning was obvious, related, or unrelated to its constituent characters, though that would be obvious be very time-consuming to create.

You’re right that I’m learning simplified characters (I live in mainland China before the pandemic) but I also probably could have stood to spent more time on components early on as you suggest on this site. I’ve started to learn traditional characters but it’s not a really priority just yet so I haven’t gone beyond the most common. I think another reason is that I’ve heavily prioritised reading over writing, which I still think is the right decision (I lived in China for two years and only very rarely would writing have been helpful) but I wonder if you have any thoughts how that changes the ways that people learn the characters – you’d still want to be familiar with the components etc for reading of course, but I assume it probably would change the optimal approach somewhat.

I’ve found it most help to focus on links between characters and words – in my Anki deck each vocab card lists, for each character in the word, any other words in the deck that include that character. I’ve found that very helpful to get a better intuitive understanding of the semantic meaning of the character and to identify when it’s just being used for its phonetics and just for general help with remembering. I do also include a breakdown of the character by components which is also often helpful for characters like 想 for the reason you mention in the article, but that actually started off as a bit of a crutch because I didn’t know the components as well as I should have.

Thank you for pointing out the error; I’ve fixed it now! 🙂

Regarding your first question, I’m not an expert in these things, but the first thing that comes to mind is that the people who created these characters didn’t speak modern Mandarin, they didn’t even speak Mandarin. Changes in the spoken language across dialects over hundreds of thousands of years have resulted in many sound components not being very consistent. If you’re interested in this, I would read up on the phonology of Middle Chinese or even Old Chinese. There are certainly systematic changes going on, although nothing is ever perfectly consistent when it comes to organically evolving languages.

Regarding your second point, I do indeed find it strange that you’ve avoided noticing 月/肉 for so long! This is much clearer in traditional Chinese where 肉 is more often (but not always) written differently (I wrote about this and related issues here). A similar problem is 玉, which is written as 王 when it appears on the right, both in simplified and traditional.

We have to realise, though, that the purpose of dictionaries is normally not to help us analyse characters, but to sort characters and words into an order that makes them easy to find. If people see 王, but you sort it under 玉, it makes it harder to find if you don’t know that 王 is actually 玉. I don’t know if this is the actual reason, but it does make sense to me. As a learners, knowing about the origin can sometimes be extremely useful (as in your case with moon and meat), but sometimes not. What’s the top part of 看? Well, you’d think it’s a variant of 手, right, and that it’s hand shading an eye, so a semantic component? Nope, according to Outlier, it was originally a phonetic component that looked nothing like 手, but more like 倝.

I haven’t worked with dictionaries, but I’ve spent a lot of time with characters with the Skritter team, and such questions are very tricky. For me, it’s obvious that you should say that 月 in 脸 actually means “meat”, which makes it much easier to make sense of lots of characters with that component. But does it make sense to analyse 看 as 倝 (a character almost no student will ever see) plus 目 and call it a phono-semantic compound, or do you go with the superficial form or folk etymology version that it’s a hand shading an eye? These are two extremes and pretty easy to deal with, but where do you draw the line? How do you draw it? This gets really complicated really fast, especially if your goal is to be pedagogical instead of just being correct. 🙂

Very long response here, but I hope you found at least something interesting in it!

Other times it turns out there is a pattern if you dig a little. For example 月 often appears in words relating to the body (胸，脑，脸，胡，背，etc). I noticed this but I but I couldn’t figure out why, until I read somewhere on this site that 月 can also be the component version of 肉 (月肉旁)。I really feel like this is something I should have know earlier, but when I looked back a lot of dictionaries and other resources I had been using explicitly refer to 月 instead of 肉 when breaking down the characters into components, which is quite misleading. I think knowing the alternative semantic meaning and origin of this component would be helpful to most learners, and makes me wonder if there are other examples of this that I haven’t picked up on.