Table of Contents

Goals

1. Understand what characters are in Chinese and Japanese.
2. Learn how to remember characters more easily by breaking them down into smaller, meaningful components.

Character basics

Introduction

Unlike English and most other languages, Chinese and Japanese do not combine letters from an alphabet to make words. They use characters.

Characters are like a picture that represent some meaning. However, it would take quite a long time to draw realistic pictures of everything, so ancient Chinese people instead drew picture-like symbols rather than detailed pictures. Some characters do look kind of like the meaning they represent, but most don’t.

Examples of characters and their meaning:

• 火 - Fire
• 山 - Mountain
• 牛 - Cow
• 肉 - Meat / Flesh