Comments on: The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/ A better way of learning Mandarin Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:12:13 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: How to talk about Chinese characters in Chinese | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-142282 Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:12:13 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-142282 […] For compound characters, the problem is slightly different. There are many hundreds of commonly used components, but since many of them have overlapping pronunciations, there is no simple way to point to a specific one. […]

]]> By: 7 ways of learning to write Chinese characters | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-141736 Tue, 14 Oct 2025 03:11:07 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-141736 […] I have written more about how Chinese compound characters work and how to learn them here: The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters […]

]]> By: The building blocks of Chinese, part 1: Chinese characters and words in a nutshell | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-140619 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:27:57 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-140619 […] compound characters are shown in red. We’ll go through compound characters in detail here in part 3: Compound characters and part 4: Learning and remembering compound […]

]]> By: The building blocks of Chinese: Learning and words really fast | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-125332 Sat, 09 Nov 2024 06:44:24 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-125332 […] Part 3: Compound characters […]

]]> By: Should you learn the pronunciation of radicals? | Hacking Chinese | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-120173 Wed, 22 May 2024 15:03:15 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-120173 […] in itself. With this broad definition, there is no definitive list of all character components. Each component can have one or more functions, so might for example provide information about sound,…. For example, in 好, both 女 (nǚ), “woman”, and 子 (zǐ) “child; son”, […]

]]> By: The building blocks of Chinese: Characters, components, radicals | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-116000 Wed, 10 Jan 2024 07:08:42 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-116000 […] Part 3: Compound characters […]

]]> By: How to learn Chinese characters: My best advice | Hacking Chinese https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-109379 Tue, 06 Jun 2023 09:07:19 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-109379 […] The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters – A vast majority of characters are compounds. For example, 休 (xiū), “to rest”, consists of a variant of 人 → 亻 (rén), “person”,  and 木 (mù), “tree”, indicating a person resting in the shade of a tree. Two components forming a compound character. Another example is 妈 (mā), “mother”, consisting of 女 (nǚ), “woman” and 马 (mǎ), “horse”. In fact, most compounds are like this, with one component providing meaning (妈 and 女 are clearly related by meaning) and another sound (妈 and 马 use the same syllable). This article also talks about character evolution, corruption and tricky cases. […]

]]> By: Tikaf https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-108878 Sat, 06 May 2023 05:27:44 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-108878 Is anyone familiar with SmartHanzi? This is a free desktop and mobile app which I have been using extensively. It uses English/French/German dictionaries and provide stroke order for starters.
But the real thing for me is that it makes uses of the English edition of Wieger’s Chinese characters (French also available), and Kanji Networks (Lawrence J. Howell) to explain the origin of characters.
–> I’d really like to know how it compares to Outlier for example 😉
There’s also the Grand Ricci dictionary available for Pleco, but I guess that’s just for French speakers, that would explain why it isn’t listed in resources, right?

]]> By: Olle Linge https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-108824 Wed, 03 May 2023 19:12:46 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-108824 In reply to Ace.

Glad to hear it helped! I think you’ll find that the more you pay attention to components in compounds, the easier it will be to pick up new characters in the future!

]]> By: Ace https://www.hackingchinese.com/learning-chinese-characters/#comment-108817 Wed, 03 May 2023 13:09:12 +0000 http://www.hackingchinese.com/?p=178#comment-108817 I using this for my homework and it kinda help thank you

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