{"id":178,"date":"2021-10-11T20:53:53","date_gmt":"2021-10-11T18:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2024-01-10T08:09:37","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T07:09:37","slug":"learning-chinese-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/learning-chinese-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"The building blocks of Chinese, part 3: Compound characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the previous article<\/a> in this series about the building blocks of Chinese, we looked at basic characters and how to learn them. We saw that most of them started out as pictures, which is probably the reason why many people think that Chinese characters are<\/em> pictures. Some learning materials aimed at beginners also give this impression, choosing to teach only characters that are easy to teach and work well as cute drawings.<\/p>\n

The fact that we looked at \u201cbasic characters\u201d implies that there\u2019s more to it than that, though, and that a vast majority of characters aren\u2019t pictographs, let alone pictures. In this article, we\u2019re going to look at compound characters in which basic characters are components that contribute to different things to the compound. Before we get started, though, here’s a list of all articles in this series (all have podcast episodes too):<\/p>\n