How to Compose Characters

Chinese In 9 Weeks: Introduction Course Lesson 1 - The Start of Something Beautiful
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Transcript

So now it's time for another building block that will use a lot. You can see it in this picture here. I've mentioned that Chinese is a pictographic language, which means it many times looks like what it wants to say what it wants to mean. So here is a square, it looks like a mouth and it actually means a map simply, however, it means a few other things as well. And I'll tell you that in a second. This now is a very common character, and it's pronounced Cole, Cole, Cole, Cole.

Now we can start seeing how Chinese characters come together to make up words. We often take two characters now and put them together. And so then we have a word with a combined with two characters who are two character word we can call them this is usually how we build words in Chinese. So for instance, now, here the character means mouth, and the next character next to is isn't is a new one. We'll go through that later in this course. It's wait and wait means smell.

So mouth plus smell and this actually means your taste. So it wouldn't be Have to just say mouth, it wouldn't be enough to just say, way that smell to say taste, you need both of them. Wonderful. And this now becomes taste cold way is what you say. So you see, this is how we'll start putting together characters in Chinese. Here's another example.

Or that was another example. I'll tell you one in a second. So this character means mouth, but also No, it also means opening says every character is used in, in a lot of words, it needs a broader, a broader, a broader meaning. So that's why this character both means mouth, but it also means opening and actually even gate anything that the way you can pass by simply an opening that you can pass by a mouth or an opening. We can use it when we say customs as well because that's something that you pass through, in and forth in and in and out. So we'll use this character when we want to say door or window or just like I said a customs as well.

So, so for instance, now this, this word here, as we can see here, means exit. So you see the mouth character here, the idea is that you pass through it. So you'll see this one, a lot of you in China, it's a good, good chance to practice this one. You see, it uses the mouth character again here. So that's how we now put Chinese characters together to form basic words, basically. So my question now is what you think happens when we put eat together with court as in one month.

This meaning is not as poetically beautiful as the other examples that I've given you with customs and, and tastes and so on and so on. This is quite a literal translation. So have a think what do you think equal could mean? Ico

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